The Mapbox Vector Tile specification has been around in the ecosystem for over 10 years, becoming a formal standard in 2017. They took off due to their lightweight encoding that allows for fast and efficient serving of map tiles. The use of vector tiles is now very common within the geospatial ecosystem with support in many FOSS4G tools for both production and consumption.

There are many approaches to serving out vector tiles to end users, with some teams choosing to generate tiles upfront with a library like Tippecanoe and statically serve them, whilst others are using a database like PostGIS and serving them dynamically, potentially with tile servers like Martin or Tegola. Some teams will use a hybrid approach with more frequently updated data being served on the fly and data that is updated less frequently being served as static files.

There are trade offs that come with choosing between static or dynamic tile serving, including speed, cost, complexity, flexibility and freshness of data. This talk we dig into these trade offs, examining how and when each approach makes sense and which options you can choose for each. Attendees can expect to come away with a nuanced understanding of these tradeoffs and insights into the tools that they could use when making this decision. We will also finish off by touching on new developments in the vector tile ecosystem like the new MapLibre Tile specification, and MVT support from DuckDB.