Re: Geospatial search in MySql – different options

[Ulf Küßner]

Well the most obvious way of avoiding the complete table scan would be to limit the distance calculations to coordinates near the one you are looking at.
alas -
where latitude > $latitude-10miles and latitude < $latitude+10miles
and so on...

Using Geometries, you can do something with a Polygon, and contains(), but that would require a good spatial index. Besides You'll have to construct a WKT polygon for your query of course.

Cheers.