Overview
Kinetica provides a Vector Tile Service (VTS) to generate Vector Tiles and support client-side visualization of the geospatial data contained within the tiles. The Vector Tile format generated follows the open standard Mapbox Vector Tile specification. The Kinetica VTS feeds a client-side Vector Tile renderer, such as Mapbox GL, by adding the VTS URL to the renderer’s style configuration as a map layer source. Any Kinetica table or view that is defined with at least one WKT-type (geometry) column can be used as the data source for thelayer parameter. The data source, geographical
position, and zoom level of each Vector Tile are specified in a VTS request.
The requested Vector Tile is then returned in the response.
The VTS offers a couple advantages over server-side WMS calls:
- VTS supports client-side control of styling like image fill
- When using vector tiles, the browser only requests new information as needed and caches data along the way; WMS output must be re-rendered on every pan/zoom
Configuration
VTS is configured via the gpudb.conf configuration file. Settings:Usage
Base VTS URI:The VTS URL needs to be specified in the client-side visualizer’s
configuration.
Example
Below is a snippet of a Javascript Mapbox style specification using Kinetica’s VTS URL as a source:Limitations and Cautions
- Since VTS sends feature information for each table row to the browser, the client can get overwhelmed with data; performance is dependent upon client hardware