All,

I am working on a rewrite of a fat client app to thin client.

Our current database design is pretty normalized. It takes as many as 36 tables to store a 'document' (these are health care claims) which must be saved in a transaction.

Contention and deadlocks have only been a minor issue with the fat client since there are typically less than 10 users on the system.

The new system will typically have ~600 simultaneous users and our POC testing has shown that we are going to experience contention issues.

I am exploring a design which will use a single table to hold 'document' information, with columns to hold 'document' metadata and the document data stored in a blob or something similar as XML.

Our app does not manipulate the data in the 'documents', and we do not do reporting on the data in the 'documents'. The 'document' needs to be available for edits and it needs to be available to the user for 13 months.

Presentation layer is ASP.Net. VB.Net for business and data layers.

Does anyone have any opinions or thoughts on such an architecture and its impact on performance?

Thanks.

Bruce