Just what is 'A big database'?

Question

Ok, dumb question I know but I see the nebulous comment \'a large database\' as well as small and medium and I wonder just what that means. Can someone define what a small, medi

Answer 1

I think something like wikipedia, or the US census data is a 'big' database. My personal address lists or todos is a small database. A middle sized database is something in between.

You could try and define the sizes by how many servers you needed. A small database is a component of an application you run on your desktop, a mid-sized database would be a single mysql (whatever) server somewhere, and a large database is going to require multiple servers with some kind of replication/failover support.