This blog post will discuss creating geo-enabled applications with MongoDB, GeoJSON and MySQL.

Introduction

Recently I published a blog post about the new GIS features in MySQL 5.7. Today I’ve looked into how to use MongoDB (I’ve tested with 3.0 and 3.2, with 3.2 being much faster) for the same purpose. I will also talk about GIS in MySQL and MongoDB at Percona Live next week (together with my colleague …

In my previous post about geo-spatial search in MySQL I described (along with other things) how to use geo-distance functions. In this post I will describe the geo-spatial distance functions in more details.

If you need to calculate an exact distance between 2 points on Earth in MySQL (very common for geo-enabled applications) you have at least 3 choices.

• Use stored function and implement haversine formula
• Use UDF (user defined function) for haversine (see below)
• In MySQL 5.6 you can use st_distance …

In my previous post I’ve showed some new MySQL 5.6 features which can be very helpful when creating geo-enabled applications. In this post I will show how we can obtain open-source GIS data, convert it to MySQL and use it in our GEO-enabled applications. I will also present at the upcoming Percona Live conference on this topic.

Data sources (US)

For the U.S. we may look at 2 major data sources:

1. ZIP codes with latitude, longitude and zip code boundaries (polygon). This can be downloaded from the U.S. Census website: …

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 …