Scaling Drupal

First off, sorry I missed last Monday. Hope to see you guys next month!

I asked this on the Drupal support list, but I thought I'd get some local input. Here's my email:

I have a site that I’m working on the data structure for… I feel like I know how I’d do it, but I was told that it might not scale well, so I thought I’d run it through you guys.

In my plan, I was going to make several content types and connect them through node references. Specifically, there would be Content Type A (CTA) pointing to CTB, pointing to CTC, that points to several of CTD’s, E’s, etc. So it could be a Store that has Departments, and each Department would have one or more Budgets, and each Budget could have several items figured into the budget, from an Employee (another content type with items of info) to Custodial (another content type with specific items), etc.

Would this cause too much server load using inherent Drupal Content Types with CCK fields (D6)? Would it only work with direct db queries and mysql tables instead? How much is lost doing it using content types instead of custom coding?

I guess I was under the impression that Content Types were very efficient, that if you create a Content Type, it is basically the same as creating a specific table in the database, but maybe not.

Any advice is appreciated. Sorry for rambling on with specifics. If you need more info, feel free to send me a direct email.

Joel