We needed GPS coordinates for 14.4 million French business establishments to power radius-based searches. Here's the pipeline we built — free, no third-party services, and designed to run daily alongside a live application without ever locking the database.
The Starting Point
The French SIRENE registry lists every active business establishment in the country: 14,387,175 of them as of July 2026. When we needed to enable queries like "find all plumbers within 20 km of Bordeaux," we had a problem: SIRENE includes postal addresses but no GPS coordinates.
INSEE (France's national statistics institute) publishes an official geocoded dataset — GeoSirene — but it's updated monthly. New establishments registered between releases have no coordinates. For any product that processes fresh SIRENE data daily, you need to geocode incrementally.
Why the BAN API
