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Freebase contains at this time of writing more than 10 million topics, more than 3000 types, and more than 30,000 properties. This is not a small database by any measure. If you were to think of it in terms of relational databases, it is probably the database with the most number of relational tables (3000+ types), and the most number of table columns (30,000+ properties).
Furthermore, Freebase is designed to store the amorphous kind of data that you find in everyday life. To store data about the prolific Bob Dylan --who composed songs, sang and performed, wrote books, acted in movies-- which relational table should we use? The "song composer" table, or the "singer" table, or the "book author" table, or the "film actor" table? The answer is that we need to store data about that same person in all those different tables. This complexity is not limited to prolific people; a building could start out as a church, be turned into a hospital during a war, and later become a tourist destination. The apple is a fruit, but also an ingredient in numerous recipes, the logo of a company, and a literary device in the story of Snow White.
What's more? Those million topics are very intricately connected. A certain politician might have run a campaign funded by a pharmaceutical company, whose board consists of some people who used to study at some particular Ivy League schools. Topics in different domains (politics, business, education, etc.) are linked together, spanning across virtually any combination of tables. Real life is intricately interconnected, and so is Freebase data.
Considering the sheer size and the data modeling complexity of Freebase, we can proudly say: this isn't your father's kind of database. It's a whole new kind of database and one that was specifically designed to play well as a citizen of the web.
Freebase is not only a web site that people can use directly with their browsers, but it's also a collection of web services that your own web applications can use to achieve things that wouldn't be possible without additional data or a hosting platform where you can develop and run securely your web applications directly in Freebase's own server infrastructure.
