ARCADE: A Real-Time Data System for Hybrid and Continuous Query Processing Across Diverse Data Modalities

The explosive growth of multimodal data-spanning text, image, video, spatial, and relational modalities, coupled with the need for real-time semantic search and retrieval over these data-has outpaced the capabilities of existing multimodal and real-time database systems, which either lack efficient ingestion and continuous query capability, or fall short in supporting expressive hybrid analytics. We introduce ARCADE, a real-time data system that efficiently supports high-throughput ingestion and expressive hybrid and continuous query processing across diverse data types. ARCADE introduces unified disk-based secondary index on LSM-based storage for vector, spatial, and text data modalities, a comprehensive cost-based query optimizer for hybrid queries, and an incremental materialized view framework for efficient continuous queries. Built on open-source RocksDB storage and MySQL query engine, AR-CADE outperforms leading real-time multimodal data systems by 7.4× on read-heavy and 1.4× on write-heavy workloads.