NOTE: This is a beta release, and the API may change before the final production release.

This is the Java API for reading MaxMind DB files. MaxMind DB is a binary file format that stores data indexed by IP address subnets (IPv4 or IPv6).

We recommend installing this package with Maven. To do this, add the dependency to your pom.xml:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.maxmind.db</groupId>
        <artifactId>maxmind-db</artifactId>
        <version>0.3.1</version>
    </dependency>

Note: For accessing MaxMind GeoIP2 databases, we generally recommend using the GeoIP2 Java API rather than using this package directly.

To use the API, you must first create a Reader object. The constructor for the reader object takes a File representing your MaxMind DB. Optionally you may pass a second parameter with a FileMode with a valueof MEMORY_MAP or MEMORY. The default mode is MEMORY_MAP, which maps the file to virtual memory. This often provides performance comparable to loading the file into real memory with MEMORY.

To look up an IP address, pass the address as an InetAddress to the get method on Reader. This method will return the result as a com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonNode object. JsonNode objects are used as they provide a convenient representation of multi-type data structures and the databind package of Jackson 2 supplies many tools for interacting with the data in this format.

File database = new File("/path/to/database/GeoIP2-City.mmdb");
Reader reader = new Reader(database);

InetAddress address = InetAddress.getByName("24.24.24.24");

JsonNode response = reader.get(address);

System.out.println(response);

reader.close();

The MaxMind DB format is an open format for quickly mapping IP addresses to records. The specification is available as part of our [Perl writer](https://github.com/maxmind/MaxMind- DB-perl) for the format.

Please report all issues with this code using the [GitHub issue tracker] (https://github.com/maxmind/MaxMind-DB-Reader-java/issues).

If you are having an issue with a MaxMind database or service that is not specific to this reader, please [contact MaxMind support] (http://www.maxmind.com/en/support).

MaxMind has tested this API with Java 6 and above. Reasonable patches for Java 5 will be accepted. Patches for 1.4 or earlier will not be accepted.

Patches and pull requests are encouraged. Please include unit tests whenever possible.

The MaxMind DB Reader API uses Semantic Versioning.

This software is Copyright (c) 2013 by MaxMind, Inc.

This is free software, licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.