Comment by ignaciovdk

Hey, thanks for asking.

I’d say both roles are possible, though the original intent of Arc was indeed to act as an offload / long-term store for systems like TimescaleDB, InfluxDB, Kafka, etc. The idea: you send data into Arc to reduce storage and query load on your primary database for ML, deep analysis, etc.

But as we built it, we discovered that Arc is really good not just at storage but at actively answering queries, so it’s kind of hybrid: somewhat “warehouse-like,” but still retaining database qualities in performance. I feel that saying a database its too much, but we are going on that direction.

IoT is absolutely one of the core use cases. You’re often ingesting tens or hundreds of thousands of events per second from edge devices, and you need a system that doesn’t choke. Our binary MessagePack ingestion helps shrink the payload size and reduce parsing overhead, that allows higher throughput for writes, which is crucial in IoT scenarios.

Let me know if you want to explore this a little more, not for selling you anything, at least not yet, I would love to understand your use case. Let me know if you are open: ignacio[at]basekick[dot]net