[moooo99]

As far as my understanding goes, mbtiles is based on SQLite, so it would be a RDBMS container based format.

There was a YouTube talk published 4 weeks ago showcasing this project, which was where I discovered it in the first place. The (German) video can be found here https://youtu.be/8A51WkJ5S8I

[cldellow]

Thanks, that's a handy video! Yes, mbtiles is based on SQLite, I was imprecise in my language.

When I said RDBMS, I meant those that have a client/server model. The versatiles docs talk about the complexity and surface area of database systems as a motivator for creating their own container format. From this I inferred they were referring to Postgres and PostGIS, which are used in the canonical OpenMapTiles implementation.

Watching that video, they do mention not liking the traditional Postgres/PostGIS approach due to its heavy weight. But they also say they disliked mbtiles due to its SQLite dependency, and that the versatiles format is inspired on/based on pmtiles. (Apologies if I'm missing nuance here, I was watching auto translated auto generated captions.)

I found https://github.com/versatiles-org/versatiles-rs/issues/24 which contrasts the versatiles format vs the pmtiles format. After reading it, I'm not personally convinced of the benefits of versatiles vs just throwing a CDN in front of a clustered pmtiles file, but perhaps I'm missing something.

[moooo99]

Oh Understood!

I think the auto translation of the subtitles captured most of the mentioned concerns very well.

In large part the conference talk indeed referenced operational concerns. However, there were also scalability and simplicity mentioned as a key consideration. One motivation for this project seemed to be having a good map for visualizing data for journalistic purposes (for example as embeds on news sites), so this concern makes sense.

In the video linked there also was a bit of a comparison between versatiles and protomaps during the Q&A block.