Often application needs to know where a user is physically located. The easiest way to figure that out is by looking up their IP address in a special database. It can all be implemented in MySQL, but I often see it done inefficiently. In my post I will show how to implement a complete solution that offers great performance.

Importing Geo IP data

First you will require a database mapping network addresses to real locations. There are various resources available, but I chose the one nginx web server uses with its geoip module. GeoLite City comes in CSV format and is available for download with no charge from MaxMind.

The archive contains two files. GeoLiteCity-Blocks.csv lists all IP ranges and maps each one to the corresponding location identifier, while …

Recently I had to turn a few EC2 instances into MySQL database servers. The third time I had to do it, I grabbed the list of steps from my previous sessions and just replayed it. Later I thought maybe polishing information a little bit and publishing a step-by-step walkthrough on the blog may help a few people. So here it is.

Before you begin.

For my MySQL instances I used the following:

• Extra Large, High-Memory, and High-CPU instances. Although the instruction should work on any type of instance.
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.2 64-bit AMI
• For MySQL data storage, multiple identical EBS devices attached to each instance

The configuration template provided in this post assumes the new MySQL instance only needs InnoDB storage engine.

Grab the packages.

Download the appropriate packages from MySQL web page. You …