I am happy to announce the merges of the Vector Mosaic datastore into the GeoServer and GeoTools codebases. The new store gives you the ability to point to large collections vector files (or database tables) with a single “index” (sometimes called a “delegate”) datastore. IoT Sensors, Sensor networks, large legacy data collections with lots of files – these are the scenarios that can benefit from a Vector Mosaic. This datastore provides the convenience of not having to create separate stores and layers for each constituent granule vector dataset. The plugin uses the index table as an index to speed up cross dataset queries (e.g., finding the granules that match the current bbox and opening only those ones). Vector Mosaic datastore layers will have a feature type that incorporates the index table attributes (with the exception of geometry and connection parameters) combined with the vector granule attributes.
Instructions for implementing the new datastore can be found here: https://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/user/community/vector-mosaic/index.html (Note that you will have to pull down a daily version of GeoServer to use this until it gets incorporated into the next release – date TBD)
The source for the underlying GeoTools implementation can be found here: https://github.com/geotools/geotools/tree/main/modules/unsupported/vector-mosaic