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It was basically NoSQL before NoSQL.

Each note was just a record, but with no schema. Schemas were imposed at the UI layer by forms and at indexing time by views.

Baffling to see this, in every place I've worked at that used Lotus Notes, it was an absolute dog on the system. Clunky, slow, and ground everything else to a halt. And this was the case even on a relatively modern laptop in 2019. Not what I'd call performant at all!

Notes was simple enough to allow folks with no computer science background or even sympathy for the machine to build teetering, badly-performing things.

However, even with a mind towards efficiency and minimalism, performance at roughly hundreds of thousands of documents was extremely elusive.

It wasn't performant, and it didn't scale. I was in a Notes shop in the mid-nineties and it was dog slow for practically everything in a perhaps fifty person company.