Fitment of SharePoint (Foundation) for a data intensive software.

Question

Hello. I am new to SharePoint technologies and trying to figure out its suitability for a product to be developed.

I am targeting using only SharePoint Foundation (not the server). Here are some of the key aspect of the target product:

1. The product is data intensive. There are scores of business and system entities involved. Business entities are expected to hold lot of data (might run into millions in a year). The business entities need to be related. Would SharePoint (Lists) be able to suffice this need?
2. The product has many reports (canned & ad-hoc). This would mean many complex queries being build and executed at run time. I am unsure if SharePoint would be suitable for this purpose.

Answer 1

From what you have described, I dont see anything that Sharepoint could do to help you.

Use Sharepoint to create a community portal around sharing of documents and content.

Your requirements would be better suited to an ASP.NET MVC app with a reporting system or templated Excel downloads using OOXML or similar.

Answer 2

So the key phrases are "data intensive", "lots of data... millions in a year", "complex queries".

The underlying platform needs to be built on a RDMS such as Sql Server/MySql/Oracle etc etc - not SharePoint lists.

There are many ways to do the rest of the project (interface for getting records in/out and reporting) including client apps, ASP.NET, RoR ... whatever fits in best with your corporate and personal expertise.

One of these UI options is an interface sitting in SharePoint - but that would still use the RDMS for the data store/query.