Tile Sources

Martin supports multiple tile sources

• MBTiles Sources Local Sqlite database containing pre-generated vector or raster tiles.
• PMTiles Sources A local file or a web-accessible HTTP source with the pre-generated raster or vector tiles.
• PostgreSQL Connections with
  • Table Sources
  • Function Sources

The difference between tile archives (MBTiles/PMTiles) and a database (PG-Table/PG-Function) is that

• database are more flexible and may (depending on how you fill it) be updated in real-time.
• Tile archives on the other hand may (depending on the data) be more compact, memory efficient and exhibit better performance for tile-serving.

=> For most usecases, you may want a mix of both. We support this via Composite Sources => For some usecases, you want the flexibility of a database, but you don’t want to pay the runtime-price. We offer the martin-cp utility to render all tiles into a tile archive. This can also be used to provide offline maps via diffing and syncing mbtiles

The difference between MBTiles and PMTiles is that:

• MBTiles require the entire archive to be on the same machine. PMTiles can utilise a remote HTTP-Range request supporting server or a local file.
• Performance wise, MBTiles is slightly faster than PMTiles, but with caching this is negligible.
• Disk size wise, MBTiles is slightly (10-15%) higher than PMTiles.
• PMTiles requires less memory in extreme cases as sqlite has a small in-memory cache.

The choice depends on your specific usecase and requirements.