Map Viz Limits

[LucianaPadua]

Hi!

I was trying to look for the limits in each map type and couldn’t find it in the guides

https://docs.looker.com/exploring-data/visualizing-query-results/interactive-map-options

As I work at Holidu, a vacation rentals metasearch, we have tons of geographical data we would like to use. However, I have faced limitations using zipcodes, lat/long and even custom map layers

Could anyone clarify what are the limits in each case? 

So far I have faced the following: 

show individual points for lat/long: maximum 5000? we would like to see how our vacation rentals concentrate and if you play around in our website you will see we have far more than 5000 🙂 

show total rentals in Germany by Zipcode:  I had to a custom layer as unfortunately Looker only has data for US zipcodes. I used this beautiful TopoJson file available in Git. It worked perfectly on Explore mode, showing all the areas corresponding to the zipcodes, but not in the Look. I have deleted row limit, so it’s not because we have this. 

We are now working with even more map layers (as we have our own definition of a vacational area for example) so I was wondering if someone could let me know better the limitations in each case and maybe workarounds. 

thanks!

[leobardor]

Hi Luciana

+1 in answer: show individual points for lat/long: maximum 5000? 

5000 ✅

Possible workarounds: Decrease Granularity

Best,

Leo

[LucianaPadua]

Hi Leo, 

do you know if this limitation is anyway considered when working with map_layers? meaning if I have more than 5,000 points that belong to a polygon, but 100 polygons, the limitation still counts? because this is what was happening. 

Thanks. 

[Dawid]

I don’t think the limit is set on a level of any dimension, this is as simple as LIMIT 5000 in the underlying query, which means it can be 5000 polygons with one point, or one with 5000 points, as long as the data returned from SQL is up to 5k. When working with geo data it’s not enough but I also understand that a browser would be crippled if we allowed tens of thousands of points. 

What triggers me is the inability to change this limit to see whether a Look/Dashboard would indeed to be too big to render