Geo-enabled (or location enabled) applications are very common nowadays and many of them use MySQL. The common tasks for such applications are:

• Find all points of interests (i.e. coffee shops) around (i.e. a 10 mile radius) the given location (latitude and longitude). For example we want to show this to a user of the mobile application when we know his/her approximate location. (This usually means we need to calculate a distance between 2 points on Earth).
• Find a ZIP code (U.S. Postal address) for the given location or determine if this location is within the given area. Another example is to find a school district for the given property.

MySQL had the spatial functions originally (implementation follows a subset of OpenGIS standard). However, there are 2 major limitation of MySQL spatial functions …