Storing the data in a "coherent way", as tfa says when it refers to schemas in a relational database, is what makes "asking questions" fast. Freenode's goal is

Storing the data in a "coherent way", as tfa says when it refers to schemas in a relational database, is what makes "asking questions" fast. Freenode's goal is to remove the schema and replace it with a graph to allow "any type of question" to be asked and make the data less structured. It's a great idea, but this will surely be much slower when it comes to asking any moderately complicated question.