Fastest Way to Find Distance Between Two Lat/Long Points

Question

I currently have just under a million locations in a mysql database all with longitude and latitude information.

I am trying to find the distance between one point a

Answer 1

A MySQL function which returns the number of metres between the two coordinates:

CREATE FUNCTION DISTANCE_BETWEEN (lat1 DOUBLE, lon1 DOUBLE, lat2 DOUBLE, lon2 DOUBLE)
RETURNS DOUBLE DETERMINISTIC
RETURN ACOS( SIN(lat1*PI()/180)*SIN(lat2*PI()/180) + COS(lat1*PI()/180)*COS(lat2*PI()/180)*COS(lon2*PI()/180-lon1*PI()/180) ) * 6371000

To return the value in a different format, replace the 6371000 in the function with the radius of Earth in your choice of unit. For example, kilometres would be 6371 and miles would be 3959.

To use the function, just call it as you would any other function in MySQL. For example, if you had a table city, you could find the distance between every city to every other city:

SELECT
    `city1`.`name`,
    `city2`.`name`,
    ROUND(DISTANCE_BETWEEN(`city1`.`latitude`, `city1`.`longitude`, `city2`.`latitude`, `city2`.`longitude`)) AS `distance`
FROM
    `city` AS `city1`
JOIN
    `city` AS `city2`