We've all heard of salesforce and sugarcrm and the likes of systems like this. Unfortunately at my workplace we have been asked to write a similiar system (rather then license or purchase). Basically the database is fairly large. Think of modules such as: Corporate groups, customers, programs, projects, sub projects, and issue management. In simple terms a corporate group has one to many customers. A program has one or more projects. A project has one or more sub projects. And an issue can be created on many sub projects.

Of course the system is a bit more complex but instead of listing every single module I think its best to keep it simple. In any event, the system in its current state has only two resources to be working on it (basically we have to do it all: CSS, database, jquery, asp.net and C#). We've started off well by defining the UI master and footer pages that way we can reuse those across all of our pages.

Now comes the hard part. The system will have about 4k end users with say 5-10% being concurrent users. We are wondering if it makes sense to cache our database data (For say 5-10 minutes) rather then continously hit our database. The reason being is some of these pages may have 5-10 search filters associated with the page. Imagine every time a selection is made from a search box how many database hits. Also some of these search fields cascade so selecting for instance an initial drop down may cascade several drop down boxes under them.

Is it wrong to cache because I am not finding too many articles on whether it is a good idea or not. Remember the system is similiar to say a CRM system where we manage our various customers, projects, sub projects, issues, etc.