the liberty of postgreslessness: tiled vectors in mapnik (tecznotes)
▻http://mike.teczno.com/notes/postgreslessness-mapnik-vectiles.html
Data is one of OpenStreetMap’s biggest pain points. The latest planet file is 27GB, and getting OSM into the Postgres database can be a long and winding road. Vectored tiles offer a way forward, and Mapnik is growing features to support them. I’m also thinking about how vectors could be used with Mapnik directly to render bitmaps without needing direct access to a spatial data base. MVT (Mapnik Vector Tiles) is my first attempt at a sensible file format.