that's essentially the route that Mapbox went down and they've even invented an entire mbtiles file format that essentially is just a sqlite db for doing these

that's essentially the route that Mapbox went down and they've even invented an entire mbtiles file format that essentially is just a sqlite db for doing these kinds of queries on the server it's the "status quo" approach today in the industry, but it has some downsides still especially for smaller builders (ie me): 1. i'd have to run a separate tile server to take in the tile requests and convert them to "sql" requests (or mbtile requests) under the hood, and I'm just not a fan of more moving parts 2. I'd have to take my 10+ TB (and growing) of geotiffs and process them all into mbtiles which is a huge compute and walltime cost 3. the resulting mbtiles end up being similar in size at best, but at worst far larger than the original geotiffs so it balloons up the hosting and egress costs in exchange for faster requests. this is a great compression optimization breakdown for geotiffs that dives into this if you're interested - https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2015/02/geotiff-compression-for-dummies.html https://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2015/02/geotiff-compression-f... anyways, I'm sure ted has his own thoughts as well but this is at least what I've taken away from this space after diving into it with fresh eyes in the past few months