Geocoding Python function for PostgreSQL

Gratefully making use of what others have provided, i.e. geopy, Google and plpythonu.

Type to hold result of geocoding:

CREATE TYPE geocoding AS (
  place text,
  latitude double precision,
  longitude double precision
);

Function that does the actual geocoding (to be extended with more vendors. Hint: look at geopy wiki). Takes an (arbitrary) input string to be geocoded:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION python_geocode
(
  input text,
  vendor text DEFAULT 'google'
) RETURNS SETOF geocoding AS
$$
  import time
  from geopy import geocoders
  # https://code.google.com/p/geopy/wiki/GettingStarted

  time.sleep(0.2)
  # TODO: Add other available vendors, e.g. Yahoo.
  if vendor.lower() == 'google':
    geocoder = geocoders.GoogleV3()
  else:
    raise ValueError("Invalid geocoder: %s" % vendor)
  try:
    for res in geocoder.geocode(input, exactly_one=False):
      yield {'place': res[0], 'latitude': res[1][0], 'longitude': res[1][1]}
  except:
    pass
$$ LANGUAGE plpythonu VOLATILE;

Example:

SELECT place, ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(longitude, latitude), 4326)
FROM python_geocode('Kostas');