New to sharepoint development, do lists replace your database?

Question

We're just starting Sharepoint development, and one of my first tasks is to build a data collection tool. It will be used across multiple sites, so there will be an admin area, and each site will pull in it's related questions, and record the data. I've gone through a bunch of tutorials on development, and have a fairly good idea of how to start. I just want to make sure I understand one thing. Do lists basically take the place of your database? If this was a regular app, I would create a question table, a link table that tells which questions are connected to which site, a table that stores the answer, linking to the site and question table.

Is this the basic pattern you follow, or should I be doing things differently for Sharepoint applications?

If the thought is to use an external databse, can anyone point me to some info on this?

Answer 1

In our Sharepoint project we stared with Lists. It was good to some point - till DB had only few relations between data. After adding tables and relations performance falls a lot and we had to switch to use standard DB in MS SQL Server. So I recomend to use DB.

Disadventages: you cannot use sharepoint controls to edit/view data and cannot restrict access to data from sharepoint level
Adventages: much faster access to data