MySQL Great Circle Distance (Haversine formula)
$greatCircleDistance = acos( cos($latitude0) * cos($latitude1) * cos($longitude0 - $longitude1) + sin($latitude0) * sin($latitude1));
with latitude and longitude in radian.
so
SELECT
acos(
cos(radians( $latitude0 ))
* cos(radians( $latitude1 ))
* cos(radians( $longitude0 ) - radians( $longitude1 ))
+ sin(radians( $latitude0 ))
* sin(radians( $latitude1 ))
) AS greatCircleDistance
FROM yourTable;
is your SQL query
to get your results in Km or miles, multiply the result with the mean radius of Earth (3959
miles,6371
Km or 3440
nautical miles)
The thing you are calculating in your example is a bounding box. If you put your coordinate data in a spatial enabled MySQL column, you can use MySQL's build in functionality to query the data.
SELECT
id
FROM spatialEnabledTable
WHERE
MBRWithin(ogc_point, GeomFromText('Polygon((0 0,0 3,3 3,3 0,0 0))'))
From Google Code FAQ - Creating a Store Locator with PHP, MySQL & Google Maps:
Here's the SQL statement that will find the closest 20 locations that are within a radius of 25 miles to the 37, -122 coordinate. It calculates the distance based on the latitude/longitude of that row and the target latitude/longitude, and then asks for only rows where the distance value is less than 25, orders the whole query by distance, and limits it to 20 results. To search by kilometers instead of miles, replace 3959 with 6371.
SELECT id, ( 3959 * acos( cos( radians(37) ) * cos( radians( lat ) )
* cos( radians( lng ) - radians(-122) ) + sin( radians(37) ) * sin(radians(lat)) ) ) AS distance
FROM markers
HAVING distance < 25
ORDER BY distance
LIMIT 0 , 20;