Useful stock SQL datasets?

Question

Does anyone know of any resources that provide good, useful stock datasets? For example, I've downloaded a SQL script that includes all of the U.S. states, cities, and zipcodes. This saved me a lot of time in a recent application where I wanted to be able to do lookups by geography. Are any of you aware of other useful datasets that are freely available for download?

For example:

• Blacklisted IP addresses
• Names of colleges/universities
• Names of corporations/stock symbols

Anyone have any recommendations?

EDIT:

As an example, here is the location where I found a MySQL script containing all of the U.S. zip codes and their corresponding latitude/longitude. Has anyone else found similarly useful datasets in SQL that can be easily imported and used?

http://www.chrissibert.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/zipcodes.7z

EDIT 2:

To clarify what type of datasets I'm talking about... I'm referring to datasets that can be immediately useful for applications, can be applied across a variety of scenarios, and typically represent information that is easy to find for small cases but harder to compile for larger data sets. The zip code database is a great example to me. It's not hard to get the lat/long for a single given zip code. But, it's a bit more time consuming to get the values for all valid zip codes in the U.S. This data is also not useful to a single industry or business sector, but can be applied across a range of applications.

Answer 1

Lots of links to open data sets here:

http://readwrite.com/2008/04/09/where_to_find_open_data_on_the/

although I doubt any of them will generate SQL statements for you.

Answer 2

Shadowman, better if you say detail list of what you want.

• Blacklisted IP addresses - Ad? Xxx? Fraud?
• Names of colleges/universities - All in the world? Wouldn't it be too much?

Here is an idea how to drop down a list of something - this is how I do that:

For example, I need a list of colleges/universities in California.

1. I google for: colleges california wikipedia. Then open the first found item there;
2. By using mouse I select all the colleges and universities from there to clipboard;
3. Open Excel and paste copied names into the first row+column;

4. In the second cell of the first row write templated script, like:

   ="INSERT INTO Colleges (state, name) VALUES ('CA', '" & RC[-1] & "');"
   

   This should produce something like

   INSERT INTO Colleges (state, name) VALUES ('CA', 'Academy of Art University, San Francisco');
   INSERT INTO Colleges (state, name) VALUES ('CA', 'Allied American University, Laguna Hills (Online)');
   INSERT INTO Colleges (state, name) VALUES ('CA', 'American Jewish University, Los Angeles');
   INSERT INTO Colleges (state, name) VALUES ('CA', 'American Sports University, San Bernardino');
   INSERT INTO Colleges (state, name) VALUES ('CA', 'Anaheim University, Anaheim (Online)');
   INSERT INTO Colleges (state, name) VALUES ('CA', 'Antioch University, Culver City');
   -- etc...
   

5. Then just copy generated script and use it for your database