I was looking for some way to do proximity searches for a client and came across these features in MySQL 5.x and higher:
The extensions allow indexing of geospatial data so that you can quickly evaluate relationships between geometries. Currently, the only completely implemented functions are the Minimal Bounding Rectangles (MBR) functions. So, for the project, I can now draw a rectangle around a reference location (longitude/latitude) and find all the locations in the spatially indexed table that fall within that rectangle fairly quickly. Here’s a google groups article that shows how to set it up:
http://groups.google.com/group/kml-support/web/getting-started-with-spatial-mysql
