GeoNames Forum

So I have GeonameId and Lat & Long for any given position. I want to be able to find out nearby products to this position, my products tabel looks like:

ProductId ProductName GeonameId
-----------------------------------------------
1 Product 1 875124
2 Product 2 987412
etc

So my question is whats the best way to find which products are close by a given location? I am using the dump on a locale MySQL database.

There are several approaches and which is best for your depends on your requirements, skills and environment.

You could add the lat/lng to the product table, that you don't have to join with all geonames records.

For the distance query you could use a spatial extension: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/spatial-extensions.html
(geonames is using postgres with postgis)
or you could use a bounding box restriction on the coordinates and sort by your own distance implementation:
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/1081.page

Other threads:
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/692.page
http://forum.geonames.org/gforum/posts/list/727.page

Best

Marc