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.
In our previous article about Loading Geolocation Data, we did load some data into PostgreSQL and saw the quite noticable impact of a user transformation. As it happens, the function that did the integer to IP representation was so naive as to scratch the micro optimisation itch of some Common Lisp hackers: thanks a lot guys, in particular stassats who came up with the solution we’re seeing now.
As I’ve been mentionning in the past already, I’m currently rewriting pgloader from scratch in Common Lisp. In terms of technical debt that’s akin to declaring bankrupcy, which is both sad news and good news as there’s suddenly new hope of doing it right this time.
