In case you are processing and working with geospatial data on MySQL, you may be interested in the following UDF (plugin) for MySQL 5.1: Koji Okumura from Oki Labs Japan has ported two functions from PostGIS into a MySQL UDF:
- distance_sphere(point, point): Returns linear distance in meters between two lat/lon points. Uses a spherical earth and radius of 6370986 meters. Faster than distance_spheroid(), but less accurate. Only implemented for points
- distance_spheroid(point, …