[wp-hackers] MySQL's spatial data support and GeoData in wordpress

[Kevin Newman]

It looks like there are some older threads on the subject of how to best 
store geo location data, but MySQL's built in spatial column support 
didn't come up, so I thought I'd mention it as a possible standard for 
geo data storage.

http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/12147/working-with-spatial-data-in-mysql/
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/creating-spatial-columns.html

My SQL skills are rusty, but I think we can still use that support even 
with the current Meta data storage format suggested here 
http://codex.wordpress.org/Geodata by using temp tables and/or 
subqueries (which if I remember correctly still use temp tables). I 
wonder if it'd be better to standardize on a static table, to avoid the 
overhead of the temp tables to gain efficient features like distance 
based sorting (if it's truly worth it to use spatial columns in MySQL - 
which I'm not even sure about).

Thoughts?

Kevin N.