Scaling? How many people are going to use this? It doesn't sound like many; budgets are not generally open to the world, unless it's a government site. So, I supect the first design point is to determine your target audience and how many they might be.

Secondly, it's not content types that are the issue; it's nodereferences that are. It might be that you find that some of that is not needed. For example, departmental structure is generally not very fluid, so hand-coding the department names as a list in the content type might reduce the level of performance issues considerably.

Nancy

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.

From: Joel Willers

I have a site that I’m working on the data structure for… I feel like I know how I’d do it, but I was told that it might not scale well, so I thought I’d run it through you guys.

Would this cause too much server load using inherent Drupal Content Types with CCK fields (D6)? Would it only work with direct db queries and mysql tables instead? How much is lost doing it using content types instead of custom coding?