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The end goal of PMTiles is similar to SQLite-over-HTTP: SQLite is designed for access on local disk, and might make many requests for a single query, each incurring a HTTP roundtrip (could take hundreds of milliseconds). PMTiles is designed from the ground up for HTTP, so attempts to minimize the # of requests to 3 or less for any tile.

The extra conversion step is something I'm hoping to get rid of by building PMTiles writers into tiling tools directly.

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You can track progress for planetiler producing pmtiles output here: https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler/issues/98.

Another bonus of writing pmtiles directly is that it will cut the time to generate vector tiles for the planet from ~40 to ~30 minutes on a 64-core ec2 instance since pmtiles format is much simpler and more efficient to write than SQLite. It should also cut the output file size a bit from the 80gb that mbtiles uses.

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