Free Country/City Database

[niconel.com]

I'm building a sample site and need a list of all (well, nearly) countries, and it's major cities.
It would be cool to also have the latitude and longitude for each, so I can re-use this for another sample site (using google maps).

It's not a problem if you can make online payments to buy such database, but unfortunately I'm stuck in China with no ability to make such payments (wont be able to afford it anyhow....quit my job to spend some time perfecting my skills and give freelancing a shot).

Come on mates...one of you must have one.....share it pretty pretty please! PM me is fine, and I promise not to go give it away or use it for any commercial use.

[TheBearMay]

Could try:

http://www.maxmind.com/download/worldcities/cities.txt.gz

[LeeU]

Come on mates...one of you must have one.....share it pretty pretty please! PM me is fine, and I promise not to go give it away or use it for any commercial use.
This would be in violation of the user agreement (http://www.jupitermedia.com/corporate/privacy/aup.html) that you agreed to when you joined the forums. Doing so would get you and the person who sent it to you banned for good from these forums.

[niconel.com]

Could try:

http://www.maxmind.com/download/worldcities/cities.txt.gz

Thanks mate. Using some files I got there I got 2 tables of 230 countries, and (still importing) like 100,000 cities, with their latitudes and longitudes.
That's going to be great for the google maps application I'm starting soon.

However, for the application I'm busy with, I'm hoping for something a bit more .... simple (that sounds better in my head, I know). Major Countries, with it's Major Cities.
Or at least the first one with regions or something. From the files I got from your links, I got region id's, but cannot find any data for that. (It's numbers, not even abbreviations)

[niconel.com]

oh heck...going over 300,000 and still importing...
guess I should look for something that exclude the rest of the milky-way? :p