Silver Layer — retired 2026-09-22¶

There is no silver layer. The pipeline is bronze → gold.

wspr.silver and wspr.v_quality_distribution were dropped on 2026-09-22. This page is kept because the layer was documented for months and the links to it are load-bearing; it now records what happened rather than instructing anyone to build it.

What was found¶

The 2026-09-22 data audit found wspr.silver holding zero rows, against documentation — this page included — that advertised 4.4 billion embeddings across 41 GiB.

It was probably not always empty. The QA table below recorded a clean-slate rebuild on 2026-02-07 producing 4,430,000,000 rows. ClickHouse's part_log and query_log retain only back to 2026-09-06, so when or how it emptied cannot be established.

That uncertainty is the finding, not a gap in it. A table can shed four billion rows and go unnoticed for seven months only if nothing reads it.

Why nothing read it¶


Written by	`bulk-processor`, a CUDA job in `ionis-cuda`. Not packaged in any RPM, no systemd unit, runs only by hand.
Read by	`wspr.v_quality_distribution` — a materialized view that was also empty.
Used to build gold	No. All fourteen populate scripts read `wspr.bronze` directly. `populate_stratified.sh` and `populate_continuous.sh` both join `wspr.bronze` to `solar.bronze`; `gold_v6` derives from `gold_continuous`. Not one script references silver.

So the bronze → silver → gold medallion chain in the architecture documents described a design. The build is bronze → gold, and the gold tables were never affected.

What was removed¶

Object	Where
`wspr.silver`	dropped from ClickHouse
`wspr.v_quality_distribution`	dropped from ClickHouse
`src/08-model_features.sql`	deleted from `ionis-core` — `src/.sql` is globbed by the `Makefile` and* by `ionis-core.spec`, so leaving the file would have recreated the table on the next apply
`src/09-quality_distribution_mv.sql`	deleted from `ionis-core`, same reason
`sql/01-model_features.sql`	in `ionis-cuda`, every statement commented out — reference schema only

03-solar_silver.sql was not touched. Despite the name it creates solar.v_daily_indices, a view over solar.bronze that exists and is in active use. The filename is a leftover from the retired concept and has nothing to do with wspr.silver.

The CUDA engine is kept¶

ionis-cuda computes real float4 embeddings and the code is sound. What it lacks is a consumer. Before it runs again, decide what reads its output — not merely where to put it. An unconsumed table is exactly how this one sat empty without anyone noticing.

Historical QA record¶

Kept for provenance. This is the run that reported 4.43B rows, and the claim this page carried until it was checked:

Clean-slate rebuild on 9975WX (2026-02-07)

Table                           Rows            Time
------------------------------  --------------  ---------
wspr.silver                     4,430,000,000   ~45 min
wspr.signatures_v2_terrestrial     93,600,000   3m31s
v_quality_distribution              ~6,100,000   (auto)

wspr.signatures_v2_terrestrial is real and current — 93.60M rows as of 2026-09-22. It is built from wspr.signatures_v1, which is built from wspr.bronze. It never involved silver.

Where to look instead¶

Bronze Stack — the raw ingest tables
Gold Layer — the training tables, built from bronze
Aggregated Signatures — the 115:1 compression that does the work this layer was supposed to do
ionis-core/docs/DATA-DICTIONARY.md — every table in the lab: source, writer, readers, derivation. Authoritative; if a document disagrees with it, that document is wrong.