mySQL version?

You forgot to mention how to implement this using mySQL.

The ip2location service is a service provided over HTTP - you don't need a local database. There are other offerings, including that from MaxMind which provide a downloadable database - but the data access is via a custom library, not a standard DBMS.

It is possible to use MySQL to do GeoIP lookups - but due to the nature of IP addresses, you can't use the normal index types - you need to map the 1-dimensional IP address space into the 2-dimensional representation and use the MySQL geospatial indexing. NB its the IP address which is geospatial - not the physical location! I use this, populated with RIPE data to get country level lookups.

This version of the IP2Location is based on a geolocation file that you can download. Although you can put it in a MySQL database, querying files directly is much faster.

Yes, it's possible to download their CSV and upload that to your DB. This is not harder than writing a single SQL request. Do you think it's worth an article? I can write it then.