I think mbtiles are being phased out for pmtiles because no DB required and can be served from static storage like R2/S3 (with a worker but hopefully the worker part goes away and they support byte offset requests soon)

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jtbaker 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The worker isn’t required, having a z/x/y tile scheme just makes caching the tiles server side super easy.

Look at the network tab on https://pmtiles.io/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fdemo-bucket.protomaps....

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stevage 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You don't need a database to serve mbtiles. If you're deploying PMTiles somewhere that doesn't support byte offset requests, then they don't really have much advantage over mbtiles.

	▲	jamessb 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That depends what you mean by needing a database. MBtiles files are SQLite database files, so you need a SQLite process running somewhere to extract the requested tiles.

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sureglymop 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

An mbtiles file is just an SQLite db which can store image or vector tiles which can be very useful.

It's great for exploring tiles but it essentially doesn't support range queries/requests, which pmtiles does.