How to find nearest cities in a given radius?

Question

Do you know some utility or a web site where I can give US city,state and radial distance in miles as input and it would return me all the cities within that radius?

<

Answer 1

You can obtain a pretty good database of geolocated cities/placenames from http://geonames.usgs.gov - find an appropriate database dump, import it into your DB, and performing the kind of query your need is pretty straightforward, particularly if your DBMS supports some kind of spatial queries (e.g. like Oracle Spatial, MySQL Spatial Extensions, PostGIS or SQLServer 2008)

See also: how to do location based search