spatial-query

I have a table in a MySQL database with a spatial geometry column of type POINT. I'd like to be able to take a point at the center of a map and find all records within X miles (or whatever distance) of it. I can't seem to find a good example or explanation of how to do this that doesn't get heavily into geometric math. I'm happy to go that route, but would first like to try and solve it with a true spatial database. It won't work because MySQL hasn't actually implemented the code to make this work. They only use bounding box queries. Notice there are no functions listed here: http://dev.mysql

We have a list of x,y pairs. Every pair represents a point on a 2D space. I want to find the closest point from this list, to a specific point xq,yq. What is the best performance-critical algorithm for this problem? Lisp of points is not going to change; which means I do not need to perform insertion and deletion. I want just to find the nearest neighbor of a target xq,yq point in this set. Edit 1: Thanks to all! As Stephan202 has guessed correctly, I want to do this repeatedly; like a function. An the list is not necessarily sorted (In fact I do not understand how can it be sorted? Like a

I'm having some fun trying to pick a decent SQL Server 2008 spatial index setup for a data set I am dealing with. The dataset is polygons, representing contours over the whole globe. There are 106,000 rows in the table, the polygons are stored in a geometry field. The issue I have is that many of the polygons cover a large portion of the globe. This seems to make it very hard to get a spatial index that will eliminate many rows in the primary filter. For example, look at the following query: SELECT "ID","CODE","geom".STAsBinary() as "geom" FROM "dbo"."ContA" WHERE "geom".Filter( geometry: