Vector tiles coming to DuckDB

#DuckDB’s #spatial extension is about to support #Mapbox Vector Tiles (#MVT) with the newly merged ST_AsMVT and ST_AsMVTGeom functions. The two new functions are scheduled to be shipped next week in DuckDB version 1.4.
Author
Published

September 10, 2025

Hot off the press collaborative coding platform: A pull request introducing ST_AsMVT and ST_AsMVTGeom has been merged into the DuckDB spatial extension. Similar to PostGIS, these two new functions will allow DuckDB to serve vector tiles in the Mapbox Vector Tile (MVT) format.

Max Gabrielsson has published a 160-line gist1 demonstrating how to set up a Flask2 app that serves vector tiles from DuckDB in a webmap.

The idea first emerged in January of last year. The feature is scheduled to ship in DuckDB version 1.4 next week!

Footnotes

  1. A short piece of code hosted on GitHub↩︎

  2. A Python framework for web apps↩︎