MySQL Great Circle Distance (Haversine formula)

Question

I\'ve got a working PHP script that gets Longitude and Latitude values and then inputs them into a MySQL query. I\'d like to make it solely MySQL. Here\'s my current PHP Cod

Answer 1

$greatCircleDistance = acos( cos($latitude0) * cos($latitude1) * cos($longitude0 - $longitude1) + sin($latitude0) * sin($latitude1));

with latitude and longitude in radian.

so

SELECT 
  acos( 
      cos(radians( $latitude0 ))
    * cos(radians( $latitude1 ))
    * cos(radians( $longitude0 ) - radians( $longitude1 ))
    + sin(radians( $latitude0 )) 
    * sin(radians( $latitude1 ))
  ) AS greatCircleDistance 
 FROM yourTable;

is your SQL query

to get your results in Km or miles, multiply the result with the mean radius of Earth (3959 miles,6371 Km or 3440 nautical miles)

The thing you are calculating in your example is a bounding box. If you put your coordinate data in a spatial enabled MySQL column, you can use MySQL's build in functionality to query the data.

SELECT 
  id
FROM spatialEnabledTable
WHERE 
  MBRWithin(ogc_point, GeomFromText('Polygon((0 0,0 3,3 3,3 0,0 0))'))