Sharepoint Lists - performance and storage considerations

Sharepoint lists are similar to database tables. They are easy to create, configure and maintain. They provide simple user-interface to create, update and delete items. Moreover, they provide a lot of useful features out of the box, like ability to attach workflows, set permissions, etc. which would normally require quite a bit of development if SQL tables were used. Therefore, there is strong temptation to use lists for many purposes where usually data tables have been used. Unfortunately, lists have performance limitations when the number of records they store grow to a large number.

According to Microsoft article the rule is to limit SharePoint lists to 2000 items for performance reasons.

Microsoft Sharepoint Team Blog provides additional insight on how to work with extremely large lists. They recommend to break down large lists into folders or views which limit number of items to 2000.

Here is one detailed article about difference between lists and database tables.

One big problem with lists is that all user lists are stored in one large SQL table in the Sharepoint content database. Hence, all of disadvantages of large tables are immediately transferred to lists in Sharepoint.