>I guess the one main point behind using tables as opposed to using the session really comes down to this: needing the data to live beyond a session's lifetime in some sort of "raw" (and easily queried) form. Otherwise, the Session and/or Cache a better (performance) bet.

If you need to cache beyond the session, could you use one mechanism during the session, like a state server, and then serialize to SQL or XML when the session ends to persist it beyond the session?

BOb