Berkeley DB and Geo::Coder::US

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Well, I found out something interesting yesterday. After hours and hours of fiddling with Geo:Coder::US perl module on both my OS X machine and my webhost (Dreamhost) running Debian, I could not get the geocoder DB I generated on my OS X machine to work on Dreamhost. Turns out that Berkeley DB environments are NOT portable. And since I can’t generate the geocoder DB on Dreamhost (too processor intesive), I’m out of luck.

…or am I?

I’m about to build a PC from scratch on which I will be installing Gentoo. I’m hoping that a Linux -> Linux DB transfer will work (since, obviously, the Mac OS X -> Linux transfer did not).

Stay tuned…

6 thoughts on “Berkeley DB and Geo::Coder::US”

  2. Well, I was leaning towards building a (relatively) cheap Athlon XP 3000+ machine. But I recently found a motherboard and CPU combo on Newegg for Athlon 64 for around the same price. I know 64bit Linux is still in its infancy, but I don’t plan on using it anyway. The 64bit CPU is still going to be faster than it’s 32bit predecessor running a 32bit OS/application.

    The Mobo and Athlon 64 3000+ combo is going for $231. Come to think of it, that’s cheaper than the ASUS & Athlon XP 3200+ combo I was going to get. That was going to run me $250+ at Tiger Direct. But yeah, I’m looking to spend around $1000 for an entire setup including monitor et al (since I don’t really have anything laying around these days).

  3. Cool! Yeah, I guess if I was going to build a new machine I’d go with an AMD64…

    You’ll have to keep us posted as to how it turns out.

    You might be able to pick up something at one of these computer expos that they have – have you ever been to one of those? Once and a while I go to the TRW swapmeet in Redondo Beach. They have lots of stuff – but not a lot of newer stuff.

    Anyhow, sounds fun!

  4. I have a windows box and I am having the hardest time trying to get the berkley DB to operate. I am trying to get Geo::Coder::US for a small project. I can’t find any doc on how o create a DB or what type you need to create for the App. Hope it is going better for you

  5. Hey Chris… I don’t have much experience with Berkeley and Windows, but I imagine you have to install BerkeleyDB for windows before configuring/running Geo::Coder::US. I could be wrong. It might just be that you need to run the Import on the data you’ve downloaded. You’d be better off asking the folks over at Geocoder.us.

    As far as my situation is… Berkeley is a very picky DB when it comes to portability. Even a compiled geocoder.db on Gentoo linux won’t work on Debian. For the project I was working on, they ended up buying credits for better service.

    Good luck