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by sfblah 281 days ago
I built a system like this to create vector tiles for mapbox at a side-job I had a few years back. Unfortunately my boss couldn't understand what I was doing and instead wanted us to run a SQL query on the database every time the map was moved, and just buy an extra-large instance for the load. I tried to explain it to him but to no avail. I finally just quit. He wasn't a dumb guy either.

Point being: If you're doing GIS stuff on a website, it's worth making sure you have folks who actually can understand these underlying technologies.

2 comments

If you need a backend anyway I like using postgis ST_AsMVT and caching the result. So pretty much running a sql query on the database every time the map is moved and then caching it. Super easy to maintain, don't have to pregenerate anything. Just bust the cache when necessary.
Exactly! I run a service that handles >1M tile requests per month served directly from PostGIS with ST_AsMVT etc. and file caching.
So running a SQL query and returning GeoJSON? Sorry that didn't work - hopefully you can work on another system like this soon, with someone who actually understands the benefits of tiles!