GeoNames Forum

I just wanted to say "thank you" for this change.

I'm using GeoNames rather seldomly, but the constant free server overload in last few weeks became a real annoyance to me. With the new username option it works like a charm again.

Are there any plans to implement some kind of individual user statistic based on the username?

Kind regards,

sjs

Hi everybody!

I've just tried the script posted at "26/11/2008 10:31:01". I'm afraid, it still has a lot of "issues":

- The subdirectories "tmp" and "pc" won't be created if the working base directories already exists.

- First copy line (geonames) yields an error
Code:

 ERROR:  value too long for type character varying(4000)
 CONTEXT:  COPY geoname, line 3185, column alternatenames:...

I got rid of this by changing the corresponding field size from 4000 to 6000.

- There's no file "featureCodes.txt" on the Geonames.org-Server, so the corresponding download, unzipping and copying into the db yields errors. (This might have to do with this, though.)

- The copy line for admin1CodesASCII yields an error
Code:

 ERROR:  value too long for type character(6)
 CONTEXT:  COPY admin1codesascii, line 502, column code: "CG.7280295"

I solved this by increasing the size of the field to 10.

- It's the same with "admin1Code".

- The copy line for countryinfo yields an error
Code:

 ERROR:  column "country" of relation "countryinfo" does not exist

I solved this by removing the "country" item from the copy command.

- The copy line for countryinfo also yields errors for wrong column names. Solution: rename "currency" to "currency_code" and "currencyname" to "currency_name".

- The copy line for countryinfo also yields an error for wrong column counts:
Code:

 ERROR:  extra data after last expected column
 CONTEXT:  COPY countryinfo, line 1:...

I've no idea on how to fix this so far.

- The copy line for alternateNames yields an error:
Code:

 ERROR:  value too long for type character varying(200)
 CONTEXT:  COPY alternatename, line 1986888, column alternatename:

Solution: set the length of this field to 300

- It might be a good idea to also include the generation of spatial indexes (like described in http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/727.page) in the script.

Kind regards,

Sebastian

marc wrote:

The free services are up again. The server had to be reinstalled completely and all disks were replaced.

Thank you very much for your effort!

Regards,
Sebastian

I was refering to whatever can be found at http://download.geonames.org/export/dump/. If this isn't a "real" db dump, I'll try one of the import methods described in the forum.

Regards,
Sebastian

idbill wrote:

I think you need to do a little research....

Yeah, I've already stumbled accross some very promising older threads in the forum.

idbill wrote:

I'm importing part of the db into mysql (postGIS would be my first choice), and it's looking like it will be in the 2gig range.

Oops, that big? So much for my plan of developing and testing this on my home server.

idbill wrote:

Also search for 'Haversine Formula', once you understand that, then you can think about creating the webservice.

I'm currently a bit confused about this. From a logical point of view, this seems the only thing to do, but I'm very worried of the achievable performance of this, especially with the 2GB amount of data in mind. Maybe PG's functional indexes will help...
Anyhow, I'm currently waiting for the free webservice to come back up again, in order to get the db dump.

Regards,
Sebastian

marc wrote:

The faulty disk was replaced but the server continues to switch into read-only mode after a couple of minutes under load.

Uh-oh - that doesn't sound all that good...

Good luck with your trouble-shooting and keep up the good work!

Bye,

Sebastian

Hi everyone!

With the current outage of the free webservice, I was thinking about setting up some kind of GeoNames mirror for my own use. Thankfully, the database itself is available for download (as soon as the server's back up

), but what about some server scripts "around" the database? My favourite application queries the webservice, so the bare database wouldn't really help me as long as I wouldn't be able to emulate the HTTP service.
Are there any pre-made scripts available for this job? (PHP would be nice, but Perl or something similiar would be OK too.)

Regards,
Sebastian

Geez, complaining about lack of professionalism in a free webservice is bit off, isn't it?

However, services seem to be up and running perfectly right now, which I'm thankful for.

Hi everyone!

Being from Germany (and being customer of T-Online) I'm suffering from rather bad service availability (a lot of timeouts) lately. At least since saturday or sunday. I've tested this mostly in the evening hours of CET.

Can anybody confirm this? Is there a (serious?) problem with the GeoNames server(s)? Any forecast for the time needed to fix this?

Kind regards,

Sebastian