Comment by Humphrey

Comment by Humphrey 15 hours ago

Yes — PMTiles is exactly that: a production-ready, single-file, static container for vector tiles built around HTTP range requests.

I’ve used it in production to self-host Australia-only maps on S3. We generated a single ~900 MB PMTiles file from OpenStreetMap (Australia only, up to Z14) and uploaded it to S3. Clients then fetch just the required byte ranges for each vector tile via HTTP range requests.

It’s fast, scales well, and bandwidth costs are negligible because clients only download the exact data they need.

https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/

simonw 15 hours ago

PMTiles is absurdly great software.

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hyperbolablabla 4 hours ago

My only gripe is that the tile metadata is stored as JSON, which I get is for compatibility reasons with existing software, but for e.g. a simple C program to implement the full spec you need to ship a JSON parser on top of the PMTiles parser itself.

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- seg_lol an hour ago
  
  A JSON parser is less than a thousand lines of code.
  
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Humphrey 15 hours ago

I know right! I'd never heard of HTTP Range requests until PMTiles - but gee it's an elegant solution.

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- keepamovin 5 hours ago
  
  Hadn't seen PMTiles before, but that matches the mental model exactly! I chose physical file sharding over Range Requests on a single db because it felt safer for 'dumb' static hosts like CF. - less risk of a single 22GB file getting stuck or cached weirdly. Maybe it would work
  
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nextaccountic 12 hours ago

That's neat, but.. is it just for cartographic data?

I want something like a db with indexes

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jtbaker 7 hours ago

Look into using duckdb with remote http/s3 parquet files. The parquet files are organized as columnar vectors, grouped into chunks of rows. Each row group stores metadata about the set it contains that can be used to prune out data that doesn’t need to be scanned by the query engine. https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/guides/performance/indexing
LanceDB has a similar mechanism for operating on remote vector embeddings/text search.
It’s a fun time to be a dev in this space!

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