Originator of MBTiles format here. The initial intentions were moving 100,000s of raster map tiles between computer and mobile device, either over USB or networ

Originator of MBTiles format here. The initial intentions were moving 100,000s of raster map tiles between computer and mobile device, either over USB or network. Main benefit was avoiding per-file transaction overhead, as well as checksumming potential. Side benefits included a small space savings over filesystem because of block overhead, plus later iterations allowed for de-duplication of e.g. all-blue water map tiles. These days, we still use the format for transport between local machine and the Mapbox backend, despite having moved to "vector tiles", which essentially are protocol buffer-based encoded geometries directly. Original post: https://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/oct/08/portable-map-tiles-format-released/ https://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/oct/08/portable-map-ti...