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Comment by oalders | Hacker News Reader

(Disclaimer: I work for MaxMind)

As far as formats go, if anyone is thinking of putting together a custom database with information keyed on IP address or IP ranges, I'd encourage you to look into our MaxMind DB format:

http://maxmind.github.io/MaxMind-DB/

There are open source file readers available in many languages: https://github.com/maxmind/?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=MaxMind-DB

There's also an open source writer https://metacpan.org/pod/MaxMind::DB::Writer

Our officially supported libraries are actively maintained and pull requests are always welcome.

I'm actually about to begin writing a blog post on how you can create your own custom databases. I'll share it on HN once it's ready.

View on HN

I don't work for MaxMind and I'd recommend it too.

A couple years ago I worked on a project that involved processing the "Internet Census of 2012" data.

The MaxMind DB format was a fast, efficient way to store simple data keyed on IPs and subnets.

Can you please confirm that the free versions are not 'good enough'? http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/geolite2/

If you want to compare the accuracy of different products, you can do so on this page:

https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city-database-accuracy

To get the actual product comparisons, you'll need to enter a country in the input box. For instance:

https://www.maxmind.com/en/geoip2-city-database-accuracy?cou...

You can try refining the distances to see how the different products compare. If you fiddle with it a bit, you'll see that the results do vary from country to country. So, "good enough" will depend on some combination of your tolerance for error + which countries you care about.

It's accuracy but not free

I'm not sure I understand. You can use the links provided and compare those results to the results you get from the free version.

"GeoLite2 City" is the free version. It's one of the 3 products in the chart.

Awesome, thanks!

we have used the free version of MaxMind for several years and upgraded to the paid version two years ago (the additional coverage provided by the paid version was the driver for us). I can highly recommend MaxMind.

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