// the find
omniscale/imposm3
Imposm imports OpenStreetMap data into PostGIS
Imposm3 is a high-performance OpenStreetMap PBF importer for PostGIS, built for tile rendering and WMS backends. It parallelizes parsing across all CPU cores and supports continuous minutely diff updates. Aimed at teams running their own OSM-based map stack — not a general-purpose geo tool.
Parallel pipeline is genuine: parsing, geometry building, and DB insertion are pipelined across cores with protobuf-encoded LevelDB caches for the intermediate node/way data. The import schema rotation (import → production swap) means you can re-import without downtime. Generalized tables are auto-created from a single mapping definition, saving the usual manual multi-zoom-level schema work. Single static binary deployment is a real operational win — just ship the binary and link GEOS/LevelDB.
The maintainers have explicitly stated no new features will be added — it's in maintenance-only mode, so if you need something it doesn't do today (e.g. cloud-native object storage for the cache, non-PostGIS targets), you're on your own. The LevelDB node cache requires RAM roughly 2× the PBF size, which means a full planet import needs ~200GB RAM — that's a hard infrastructure constraint, not a tunable. SSL is disabled by default with a connection string flag to re-enable, which is the wrong default for any production database. The mapping config format (JSON/YAML) has no schema validation tooling, so misconfigured mappings fail at import time rather than at mapping parse time.