Order by nearest - PostGIS, GeoRuby, spatial_adapter

Question

I\'m trying to do an order query that finds records nearest to the current_user.

I know the distance between the two points is: current_location.euclidean_distance

Answer 1

To get the 5 closest:

SELECT * FROM your_table 
ORDER BY ST_Distance(your_table.geom, ST_Geomfromtext(your point as wkt)) 
limit 5;

If you have a big dataset and know that you don't want to search further than , say 1 km, the query will be more efficient if you do:

SELECT * FROM your_table 
WHERE ST_DWithin(your_table.geom, ST_Geomfromtext(your point as wkt, 1000)
ORDER BY ST_Distance(your_table.geom, ST_Geomfromtext(your point as wkt))  
limit 5;

/Nicklas