title: SharePoint InfoPath best practices for persisting large forms
body: <p>I am currently architecting a large SharePoint deployment.</p>
  
  <p>This deployment has the potential to grow to petabytes in size over the course of several years.  </p>
  
  <p>One of the current issues we are discussing is the option of storing our data in SharePoint using InfoPath Forms.  Some of these forms contain hundres of fields and require a lot of mapping to content types for persistence and search.  Our search requirement is primarily a singular identifier and NOT the contents of the forms, although I am told I should preempt the "want" to search in the future.</p>
  
  <p>We require our information to be utilised for secondary purposes (such as reporting etc). The information MUST be accessible instantly after persisting to the system. </p>
  
  <p>My core questions therefore are:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What are the benefit/risks of this approach compared to storing
  our data in a singular relational store using web-service
  persistence?</li>
  <li>If we decided on this approach what would be the
  impact of changing the forms, content-types over time? </li>
  <li>What happens when our farm grows beyond a single web-application / site collection how accessible will the information be?
  Will I know where it is and how portable will the information be overtime?</li>
  </ol>