IP Geolocation Compact — MMDB

At a glance

A lookup returns

LocationId, ConfidenceAreaId, IsCellular, HostingLikelihood, ConfidenceScore and DeploymentExtentKm for the range containing the IP. Locations.csv, ConfidenceAreas.csv and place names in 10 languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese), compiled and maintained by BigDataCloud, are in the same ZIP and turn the IDs into coordinates, place names and polygons. Each language falls back to the English name where a translation isn't published.

What it's for

City-level location inside your internal systems, with no API call per lookup.

Other packages add

BGP prefixes, RIR registry ranges and an ASN per IP in Network Data (see Network MMDB); hyper-local, in-city location on wired networks, each ASN's most active operational area, and proxy, Tor and VPN lists in Complete (see Complete MMDB).

Scale

Tens of millions of IPv4 and IPv6 ranges. Manifest.csv has the exact counts for each release.

Licence

Flat Data Standard Licence: internal use by your company and its employees only.

Files in the archive

Keys

How the files join

Manifest.csv describes the release, and NOTICE.txt holds third-party data attributions.

To geolocate an IP: look it up in bigdatacloud-compact.mmdb, then join LocationId to Locations.csv (and its GeoNames IDs to the language file you need) and ConfidenceAreaId to ConfidenceAreas.csv.

Sample data

Sample records from the 11 October 2026 release. Values change with each daily update.

139.130.4.5             {"LocationId": 150626, "ConfidenceAreaId": 1742, "IsCellular": false, "HostingLikelihood": 0, "ConfidenceScore": 3}
1.37.82.10              {"LocationId": 2001, "ConfidenceAreaId": 690, "IsCellular": true, "HostingLikelihood": 0, "ConfidenceScore": 4, "DeploymentExtentKm": 250}
2001:8000::1            {"LocationId": 2319, "ConfidenceAreaId": 221465, "IsCellular": false, "HostingLikelihood": 0, "ConfidenceScore": 4, "DeploymentExtentKm": 1000}
2001:1890:152a:5b00::1  {"LocationId": 59587, "ConfidenceAreaId": 221659, "IsCellular": false, "HostingLikelihood": 0, "ConfidenceScore": 2}
192.168.1.1             no record

Each record carries only the keys that hold a value. DeploymentExtentKm is supplied where collected network information is statistically significant, as for 1.37.82.10 and 2001:8000::1. Joined, 139.130.4.5 resolves to AU, AU-VIC, Melbourne (-37.82, 145.16), confidence area 1742, and 1.37.82.10 to Meycauayan, PH-03, Philippines.

Behaviour and edge cases

Supplied keys

Each record carries the keys that apply to it, and each key description says when it is supplied. Check that a key is present before you use it.

Private and reserved addresses

Addresses such as 10.0.0.0/8, 127.0.0.0/8, 100.64.0.0/10, 169.254.0.0/16, 192.168.0.0/16, ::1 and fc00::/7 return no record.

IPv4 and IPv6

One file answers both. IPv4 lives at ::/96, so ::a.b.c.d and IPv4-mapped ::ffff:a.b.c.d addresses answer from the IPv4 data (::ffff:139.130.4.5 returns the same record as 139.130.4.5).

IDs belong to the package

LocationId and ConfidenceAreaId are specific to Compact and to each release, so join them only to lookup files from the same download. GeoNames IDs are the same in every package.

File conventions

The lookup files in this ZIP are UTF-8 with CRLF line endings, Manifest.csv included. The Geonames-*.csv files start with a BOM, so use a BOM-aware reader. MMDB metadata: database_type is BigDataCloud-Compact, and build_epoch is the same moment as Build Complete in Manifest.csv. Full lists: lookup file conventions and MMDB conventions.

Download

Download from your BigDataCloud account, or automate it with your API key:

curl -fL -o bigdatacloud-compact-mmdb.zip "https://www.bigdatacloud.com/download?package=compact&format=mmdb&key=YOUR_API_KEY"

URL=$(curl -s -D - -o /dev/null -H 'x-bdc-key: YOUR_API_KEY' \
  "https://www.bigdatacloud.com/download?package=compact&format=mmdb" \
  | awk 'tolower($1)=="location:" { sub(/\r$/, "", $2); print $2 }')
curl -fo bigdatacloud-compact-mmdb.zip "${URL:?no download link: check the key and package}"

Updates and integrity

• Updated daily. Download on any schedule that suits you; updates are included in your subscription.
• Manifest.csv records the build time (Build Complete), the data timestamps and the row totals, then one row per other file in that ZIP, including NOTICE.txt where present, with its byte count, so you can check a complete download and load. To check the ZIP itself, see Check a download.

Code samples

Look up one IP and join to place names (Python). Install a reader with pip install maxminddb. Loading Locations.csv into a dictionary like this uses a lot of memory; for production, load the lookup files into a database or key-value store.

import csv
import maxminddb

def load_csv(path, key):
    # utf-8-sig skips the byte-order mark some files start with
    with open(path, newline="", encoding="utf-8-sig") as f:
        return {row[key]: row for row in csv.DictReader(f)}

# Lookup files from this ZIP
locations = load_csv("Locations.csv", "LocationId")
names = load_csv("Geonames-en.csv", "GeonamesId")

with maxminddb.open_database("bigdatacloud-compact.mmdb") as db:
    record = db.get("139.130.4.5")  # None for private or reserved addresses

if record and "LocationId" in record:
    loc = locations[str(record["LocationId"])]
    city = names.get(loc["CityGeonamesId"], {}).get("Name")
    print(loc["CountryIso"], loc["SubdivisionIso"], city,
          loc["Latitude"], loc["Longitude"], record.get("ConfidenceAreaId"))
# AU AU-VIC Melbourne -37.82 145.16 1742

MMDB reader libraries are available for most languages, and they all work the same way: open the file, look up the IP, read the keys.

Related

• Compact CSV
• Lookup files reference
• Downloads & automation
• Complete MMDB · Network MMDB
• Overview