Can I update only a portion of my existing tileset?
When you update your tilesets with either MTS or the Uploads API, it is only possible to re-tile the full tileset, no matter how much of your data changes with each update. For example, even if only 5% of your data changes every day, you still have to re-tile your entire tileset to see these changes on your map.
If your data doesn’t update that quickly, or if only a small amount of your data updates at a time, you can batch your data updates together outside of Mapbox until you reach a certain threshold of data changes before you update your tilesets. For example, in your database, you can keep two states of your data at one time:
- A copy of the data you most recently sent to Mapbox
- A copy of your data that receives real time updates
You can continuously calculate the difference between the two states of data until a certain percentage of your data has changed (for example, by using feature counts, hashing the feature geometries and taking the difference, or similar strategies), and then you can update your Mapbox tilesets.
You can also set a fixed frequency for your data updates regardless of how much your data has changed so that you can more accurately predict your future costs.
You can find more information about how to update a tileset in our Mapbox Tiling Service Guide.