Should I store serialized (to xml) object in SharePoint list?

A requirement of my website is that I pull down data from external sources. To pull down the data, I have created a timer job (SPJobDefinition). In this job, I need to store the external data somewhere. First I was thinking I would just store it in cache, but then I was thinking I might want to have the data around longer (plus, I don't know how to get at the cache from my timer job). So, I was just thinking I would store my serialized object in a list. Since there is no xml column type in SharePoint, I was going to just store it in a plain text (multi-line) column. Is this an bad practice? Or is this an ok thing to do? The only other options I can think of are: to write a file out to disk; or to use a custom table on the db (but this makes managing and deploying a lot harder).

Any other options anyone can give me?

Oh, and are there any limits on the size for the multi-line plain text field? I will likely be storing a se开发者_开发技巧rialized list, so the xml might be pretty big.

Thoughts anyone?

We had to do almost the same thing. We chose to store the XML in the multi-line field, and it worked perfectly, this is also a good solution for multi-WFE farm, as you don't need to worry about syncing your servers. The multi-line field is mapped to ntext in SQL, so there is no limitation on the size.