I'm still trying to wrap my head around the relations concept.



Let's say that we had a collection of Employees, each of which

contains a reference Person and a Company. If we tried to pull a list of

10 from a certain company, would that be 20 references (2 per record * 10

records returned) or is that just 2 references (2 per record)? If it's

the latter, then I think the limitation is a non-issue for us.



Also, do user permissions apply to individual records within a collection

or do they only apply to each collection as a whole?

References are resolved server side and returned in a completed JSON format. Each reference is resolved and plugged into the resulting structure for every instance of it, meaning you would see 20 references in the returned structure. This does mean a larger payload. Checkout the limitations section of the references documentation to see more details: http://devcenter.kinvey.com/guides/datastore#limitations



User permissions apply to individual records, each record has an ACL entry which can then be used to give specific access to other users. There are global permissions that can be assigned via the console for the collection.