Question

Is it a custom database, or are they using a ‘classic’ triple store ?

Answer 1

Chasing some old posts, I found this message on their board, followed by this response to a query directed at the developer mentioned in the first message.

While I doubt the developer’s response is the mentioned ‘long post’ of the first, it notes:

“We have written our own graph database on top of Unix. We don’t have an RDBMS or OODB storage layer because conventional databases don’t handle the volume of self-joins that graph queries generate. Persistence is via memory mapped files with our own transaction manager, custom tailored to provide exactly the (minimal) ACID requirements that we have.”

So unless freebase.com have changed their back end tools since Jan ’08, it’s a custom database.