Numeric types in MySQL have two varieties: - “precise” types such as INTEGER and DECIMAL; - the IEEE-standard floating point types FLOAT and DOUBLE. As a rule of thumb, the first group are for exact, “counted” quantities. The INTEGER types represent whole numbers, and DECIMAL represents “fixed point” decimal, with a preset number of places after the decimal point. Various widths of INTEGER are available in MySQL, from 8-bit TINYINT to 64-bit BIGINT. Calculations with integer types are fast, as they usually correspond to hardware register sizes. DECIMAL is commonly used for quantities like decimal currency where the number of digits of precision is known and fixed. For example, exactly counting pennies in two decimal digits. Computation with DECIMAL is slower than other types, but this is unlikely to impact most applications. In the other category are FLOAT and DOUBLE, which are the 32 and 64-bit IEEE standard types, which are usually …

The amount of data out there via API's is increadible these days. For instance you can take an address, and get the latitude and longitude using Google's GeoCoding API.

I am using this API along with some others to build a pretty some interesting stuff (more on that when its public).

Today I needed to calculate the distance between two points, I found a bunch of formulas here to convert two lats and longs into miles. They had some more complicated formulas, but I went with an easier one because approximate accuracy was sufficent. Here's how the formula translated into SQL (tested on MySQL):

SELECT id, place_name,
ROUND( SQRT( POW((69.1 * (#Val(arguments.latitude)# - latitude)), 2) + POW((53 * (#Val(arguments.longitude)# - …