The free GeoLite versions are normally good enough, at about 98% accurate, but the for-pay GeoIP versions in theory are more accurate. This allows you look up nearly any IP and find out which country (hopefully) its user resides in.
The most popular of their databases that I’ve seen used is GeoLite Country. They release both a commercial (for-pay, but affordable) product called GeoIP, and a free version of the same databases, called GeoLite. MaxMind is a great company that produces several geo-referencing databases. This is actually OK for the most part, as the geo-referencing functionality most people need doesn’t really need transactional support, and since the data tables are basically read-only (monthly replacements are published), the likelyhood of corruption in MyISAM due to any server failures isn’t very high. Unfortunately, R-tree (spatial) indexes have not been added to InnoDB yet, so the tricks in this entry only work efficiently with MyISAM tables (although they should work with InnoDB, they will perform poorly). After working with a Proven Scaling customer, I recently did some thinking and some performance testing on this problem, so I thought I would publish some hard data and advice for everyone. There is a lot of questionable advice on forums, blogs, and other sites out there on this topic. This is a very common task, but I have never actually seen it done efficiently in MySQL in the wild. There are a lot of reasons you may want to geo-reference IP addresses to country, city, etc., such as in simple ad targeting systems, geographic load balancing, web analytics, and many more applications. Geo-referencing IPs is, in a nutshell, converting an IP address, perhaps from an incoming web visitor, a log file, a data file, or some other place, into the name of some entity owning that IP address.
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