I'm starting a new rails project that integrates closely with Google Maps. When a user searches for a city, I'm trying to decide whether to geocode the address on the fly (using Google's Geocoding API) or to look up the city in a database pre-populated with lat/long. After I have the lat/long I will plot it on Google Maps.
Which do you think would perform better? With the database lookup, the table would have to be pretty large to account for all the cities I would need and I would have to fallback on the geocoding API anyway for any cities that I don't have in my database.
I wasn't sure if there is a common practice to this or not. I don't need a user's specific location, but just a city they are searching for.