Using Amazon DynamoDb for IP and co-ordinate based geo-location services part 2: MaxMind source files

Introduction

In the previous post we outlined the goals of this series and the tools that we’re going to use. We’ve got as far as downloading MaxMind’s free version of their geo-location source with IPs and longitude-latitude co-ordinates. We saw that the downloaded package had a number of CSV files.

In this post we’ll start off by looking at the structure of those files and how they are connected.

The source files

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Using Amazon DynamoDb for IP and co-ordinate based geo-location services part 1: introduction and goals

Introduction

There are a lot of applications out there that involve finding a point on a map. Putting hotels, restaurants, metro stations etc. on a map on your mobile device has become commonplace. Queries that find the nearest hospital, theatre or school need to be executed in a fast and efficient manner.

In this series we’ll discuss a possible solution to the following geo-location related scenarios:

• You have a pair of longitude (lng) and latitude (lat) co-ordinates and you’d like to find all locations in a circle around that point or just the nearest relevant location, e.g. the nearest city
• You have an IP address and you’d like to find the location details of that address, such as New York or Sydney

The series is centred around Amazon cloud based tools. Even if you’re not familiar with Amazon Cloud but looking for a solution to questions similar to the ones outlined above I encourage you to read on – you might just find something useful.

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