[snodnipper]

+1

> And lastly to your point about lightweight desktop software, tiles don’t really have a place in the data process. They’re only really useful for the visualization aspect. And frankly, I think we’re reaching the capacity of the technique, we just might have some headroom in server efficiency.

Not totally sure what you mean on your last point...data can be feature centric (e.g. stored by feature id) or area centric (stored by area location) etc. Storing data by location is important far beyond visualisation and is abstracted in databases such as PostGIS/Postgres (a branded data structure). That said, I acknowledge that ArcGIS Pro, QGIS etc. have limited support for tiled data but of course that is changing. Safe funded much (all?) of the OGR MVT development afaik.

[bransonf]

Oh, I meant more about data analysis. Typically you don’t import raster tiles unless we’re talking about imagery.

But as far as like roads and boundaries, you should always work with the raw vectors.

[kylebarron]

This isn't _necessarily_ true, doing data analysis on vector tiles allow for high parallelization. See TileReduce [0]

[0]: https://github.com/mapbox/tile-reduce