The Oliver blog

Notes from the engine room.

What the team building Oliver measured, and what we learned from it.

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A hand-drawn chart of the Kardashev scale. An arrow labelled increasing energy use runs above four stages: Type 0, sub-planetary; Type I, planetary; Type II, stellar; and Type III, galactic. A note places humanity today at about Type 0.73.
Essay

Type 0.73

Humanity runs on a fifth of one per cent of the power a planetary civilization would command, and its newest machines are already short of wire.

11 November 202614 min read
Layers of sediment holding still fragments of data, with a branching network rising out of the top layer and lighting up as it grows.archiveLiving Software · 01
Living Software · 01

Oliver: a Living Database.

Databases were built as archives, where data settles into layers and waits for someone to dig. Oliver senses what arrives, reacts when it changes and remembers what it learns, fast enough to have reflexes.

26 October 20265 min read
One metric drawn at three zoom levels: thirty days, one hour and fifteen seconds of raw points, each answered in milliseconds.under 10 msa typical chart, at every zoom level30 days1 hour15 seconds, every pointOliver series mode
Metrics

The dashboard you can't stop refreshing.

Series mode gives Oliver the habit-forming part of a great metrics product: drag a time range, zoom from a month to a minute, slice by any label, and the chart is already there. Typical charts draw in under 10 milliseconds at every zoom level.

9 October 20263 min read
Two indexes over the same log data drawn one tile per megabyte: 128 tiles for the existing index and 37 for the new one, which finds a common word 714 times faster.714×faster on a common word7 µsto find it, in under a third of the spaceexisting index · 128 MBnew index · 36.9 MBone tile = 1 MB of index · same log data
Search

Full-text search is now up to 714× faster.

We built a new full-text index for Oliver. It finds a common word in 7 microseconds, takes up to 3.5 times less space, builds nearly five times faster, and returns exactly the same answers as our existing index.

7 October 20262 min read
Achilles in full armour sprinting across a Greek hillside toward a tortoise, drawn as a row of successive strides that close the gap one step at a time.
Frontier

Oliver: a Frontier Database™.

Frontier models run on GPUs, and now the database they ask does too. On one GPU, Oliver answers over 6,000 questions a second across 100 million rows, up to 2,529 times faster than asking them one at a time.

29 September 20264 min read
244 query shapes, one tile each, shaded by how much faster Oliver answered: a 3.06 times median, the brightest 290 times faster.290×one user, 50 million rows3.06×median speed-up1.1×60×+under 1.1×Oliver vs ClickHouse 26.3 · 16 Sep 2026
Benchmarks

Oliver beats ClickHouse.

Across 244 query shapes on identical servers, Oliver was 3.06 times faster than ClickHouse at the median, and it ran all of them in less time than ClickHouse took to load the data.

27 September 20263 min read