We can roughly divide implementations into small, medium, and large.

A full definition of these terms includes an accounting of record size (number and size of properties and dimension values per record), total data set size, the number of indexing and MDEX Engine servers, and other measurements of scale.

Although that level of detail is necessary for sizing a specific implementation, it is not necessary for the more general discussion of hardware architecture here. For simplicity's sake, this chapter uses the terms small and medium e as follows: