6 Articles tagged “Geolocation”

We have loaded Open Street Map points of interests in the article The Most Popular Pub Names — which compares PostgreSQL with MongoDB for simple geographical queries, and is part of our PostgreSQL Extensions article series. In today’s article, look at how to geolocalize an IP address and locate the nearest pub, all within a single SQL query!

For that, we are going to use the awesome ip4r extension from RhodiumToad.



Continuing our series of PostgreSQL Data Types today we’re going to introduce the PostgreSQL Point type.

In order to put the Point datatype in a context where it makes sense, we’re going to download a complete geolocation data set and normalize it, thus making good use of both the normalization good practice and those other PostgreSQL data types we’ve been learning about in the previous articles of this series.

Buckle-up, this is a long article with a lot of SQL inside.



In our recent article about The Most Popular Pub Names we did have a look at how to find the pubs nearby, but didn’t compute the distance in between that pub and us. That’s because how to compute a distance given a position on the earth expressed as longitude and latitude is not that easy. Today, we are going to solve that problem nonetheless, thanks to PostgreSQL Extensions.


Dimitri Fontaine

PostgreSQL Major Contributor

Open Source Software Engineer

France