Comment by ianlevesque
5 years ago
This is easily the most clever web programming hack I’ve seen this year. Bravo. I had seen this used for video or audio of course but it never occurred to me you could use it for databases. There are probably a ton of other formats this is good for too.
I wonder if this could be used to serve dynamic maps.
This is pretty much exactly what we do to serve aerial/satellite imagery maps.
We convert the imagery into Cloud optimised geo tiffs and store them in S3 https://www.cogeo.org/ then the browser can request the tiles directly from S3.
Even the big imagery providers are now storing their imagery as COGs, eg https://registry.opendata.aws/sentinel-2-l2a-cogs/
I believe this is protomaps approach: re-encode the mbtiles (sqlite-based ) format in to something that can be requested with a http range request and thus served from a single dumb webserver that doesn't need to understand sqlite or mbtiles parsing
This is the approach I took with http://github.com/protomaps/pmtiles , though it's optimized for the very specific use case of going from Z/X/Y integer coordinates to binary blobs, and takes shortcuts to accomplish that (fixed-width keys and root index page)
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