Question

I want to have countries and cities dropdowns to my site. I’ve found this huge list (~3million) of cities http://www.maxmind.com/app/worldcities and I wonder if it is proper to import this to my database or it will become too heavy.
How to handle this?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

If you are happy with the “open data license” clauses there is nothing to stop you using the list – but I think you will need to use something more intuitive than a plain dropdown for 3 million items; some kind of ajaxy autocomplete seems more appropriate.

Three million rows is nothing mysql can’t handle – depends on whether the storage is worth the data. Perhaps you could strip out cities that are irrelevent?

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