Are there any in-memory hybrid databases available

Scalability is factor for every business that expects large growth. Ultimately only you and your team can answer the question with whatever is right for your pocketbook and time considerations. The best we can do is offer some options.

You could use a master MySQL database for the writes and then implement replication to create multiple, read-only slaves.

Or MySQL for the write database and then create a custom ETL application to convert the transactional data into read-only and place it into a NoSQL database like Cassandra. I've found Cassandra to be optimal for tons and tons of reads (which is great if people are performing searches on your content), but it will require you to be pretty savvy in the database realm.

I see two competing/conflicting requirements:

RAM/memory based database

and

more than one executable to be able to access the DB concurrently

They are competing/conflicting because modern operating systems normally enforce strict segregation for RAM allocated to specific processes (there are exceptions, but in the main this holds).

One option here is to copy your database to a RAM disk. That would allow separate apps to treat the database as if it were a file. The downside here is that the contents of a RAM disk won't survive a reboot of the host machine, and so you need a very robust system to keep your database saved to a real hard disk as well.

But really, if you want multiple apps sharing the same db, you're much better off using a database server. Enforcing safe, concurrent access is one of two main reasons databases exist as distinct entities from flat file stores (the other is efficient joins).