One post tagged with "sqlite"

The whole geocoder runs in your browser. You type an address, you get a rooftop coordinate, and no server ever sees your query — the gazetteer it resolves against is a SQLite database sitting on a CDN, and the page reads it with HTTP range requests, a few kilobytes at a time. It's a lovely trick. We were proud of it. Then we counted the requests it took to find a single city, and the number was 243.

So the questions for the day: why does looking up one name cost 243 round trips? What goes wrong when you search a database you can only read a slice at a time? And how do you get a global gazetteer — every country, region, county, and city we resolve against — down to about a dozen reads without putting a server back in the loop?