Shallow Hierarchy & db-driven site

Do SEs demand shallow hierarchies within a db?

[poet]

I am creating a site with tons of content. Normally, I would have extremely logical and four or five levels deep hierarchy to keep all the content straight.

But this is a dynamic db-driven site. So there will, I assume, be just one or two hierarchies on top, then all the files thrown into the db.

Do I need to worry about the hierarchy structure that my programmer is creating in the db? Will a shallow structure work better for SEs?

(I think I need to do a mod_rewrite to help the SEs get into the db.)