Finding databases for use in applications

Question

Does anyone have some recommendations on how I can find databases for random things that I might want to use in my application. For example, a database of zip code locations, area code cities, car engines, IP address locations, food calorie counts, book list, or whatever. I'm just asking generally when you decide you need a bunch of data where are some good places to start looking other than google?

EDIT:

Sorry if I was unclear. It doesn't necessarily need to be a database. Just something I could dump into a relational database like a CSV file. I was just listing some examples of things I've needed in the past. I always find myself searching all over Google for these types of things and am trying to find a few places to look first. Are there companies that just collect tons of data on things and sell it or give it away?

Answer 1

You don't necessarily need a database to get going. A lot of the kinds of information you're listing will exist in delimited files (such as CSVs.) Any structured text file will do since importing woth most major database engines is somewhat trivial. In fact, the raw data will most likely not exist in a db for that reason. E.g. you can then imported into the RDBMS of your choice and the provider of that data does not need to worry about a bunch of different db formats.

• Zip Code CSV file at SourceForge
• List of english words (not CSV per se, but just as easy to import... for things like spell checkers)
• Really good looking source of a few different datasets

Answer 2

If you want to track the users position this http://code.google.com/apis/gears/api_geolocation.html might be a better way than a lookup table or a csv file.

Answer 3

• Bureau of Labor Statistics
• The Zip Code Database Project
• US Census Bureau (You can use their interface to create and download custom CSV files)
• Data.gov has tons of stuff