I am working on an application that displays choropleth maps. These maps are of all different types, some display state by county, country by state/province, or world by country.

How should I handle storing the map information in the database?

My Thoughts:

I won't need to do queries to find POI inside a region, so I don't think there is a need to use spatial datatypes. I am considering storing a map as a geoJSON object (I am using JS mapping library that accepts geoJSON).

The only issue is what if I want a map of the US northeast. Then I would have geoJSON for the US and a separate one for the US northeast, which would be redundant.

Would it make sense to have a shape database where I had each state then when I needed a map of the US I could query for each state, and when I needed a map of the US Northeast I could again query for what I need?

Note: I am not concerned with storing the data for each region, just the region itself. I will query for the data on the fly for the specific region.