Get the nearest longitude and latitude from MSSQL database table?

Question

Ok I have searched SO and Google but haven't really found a definitive answer so throwing it out there for the SO community.

Basically I have a table of longitudes and latitudes for specific points of interest, the sql query will know which location you are currently at (which would be one of those in the table, passed in as a parameter), therefore it then needs to calculate and return the one row that is the nearest latitude and longitude to the passed in one.

I require this to all be done in MSSQL (2012 / stored proc) rather than in the calling application (which is .NET) as I have heard that SQL is usually much quicker at processing such queries than .NET would be?

EDIT:

I have found the STDistance Function which gives the number of miles between locations such as :

DECLARE @NWI geography, @EDI geography
SET @NWI = geography::Point(52.675833,1.282778,4326)
SET @EDI = geography::Point(55.95,-3.3725,4326)
SELECT @NWI.STDistance(@EDI) / 1000

However I don't want to have to iterate through all of the lat/lons in the table as surely this would be terrible for performance?

I also tried converting one of the examples pointed out in one of the below comment links (which was MYSQL not MSSQL) however I am getting an error, the code is as follows:

DECLARE @orig_lat decimal(6,2), @orig_long decimal(6,2), @bounding_distance int
set @orig_lat=52.056736; 
set @orig_long=1.14822; 
set @bounding_distance=1;

SELECT *,((ACOS(SIN(@orig_lat * PI() / 180) * SIN('lat' * PI() / 180) + COS(@orig_lat * PI() / 180) * COS('lat' * PI() / 180) * COS((@orig_long - 'lon') * PI() / 180)) * 180 / PI()) * 60 * 1.1515) AS 'distance' 
FROM [DB1].[dbo].[LatLons]
WHERE
(
  'lat' BETWEEN (@orig_lat - @bounding_distance) AND (@orig_lat + @bounding_distance)
  AND 'lon' BETWEEN (@orig_long - @bounding_distance) AND (@orig_long + @bounding_distance)
)
ORDER BY 'distance' ASC

The error received is:

Msg 8114, Level 16, State 5, Line 6 Error converting data type varchar to numeric.

Anyone able to work out the above code or come up with a better solution?

Answer 1

Let's look at a simple example of using the STDistance function in SQL Server 2008 (and later).

I'm going to tell SQL Server that I'm in London, and I want to see how far away each of my offices are. Here's the results that I want SQL Server to give me:

First, we'll need some sample data. We'll create a table containing a few locations of Microsoft offices, and we'll store their longitude & latitude values in a geography field.

CREATE TABLE [Offices] (
    [Office_Id] [int] IDENTITY(1, 1) NOT NULL,
    [Office_Name] [nvarchar](200) NOT NULL,
    [Office_Location] [geography] NOT NULL,
    [Update_By] nvarchar(30) NULL,
    [Update_Time] [datetime]
) ON [PRIMARY]

GO

INSERT INTO [dbo].[Offices] VALUES ('Microsoft Zurich', 'POINT(8.590847 47.408860 )', 'mike', GetDate())
INSERT INTO [dbo].[Offices] VALUES ('Microsoft San Francisco', 'POINT(-122.403697 37.792062 )', 'mike', GetDate())
INSERT INTO [dbo].[Offices] VALUES ('Microsoft Paris', 'POINT(2.265509 48.833946)', 'mike', GetDate())
INSERT INTO [dbo].[Offices] VALUES ('Microsoft Sydney', 'POINT(151.138378 -33.796572)', 'mike', GetDate())
INSERT INTO [dbo].[Offices] VALUES ('Microsoft Dubai', 'POINT(55.286282 25.228850)', 'mike', GetDate())

Now, supposing we were in London. Here's how to make a geography value out of London's longitude & latitude values:

DECLARE 
    @latitude numeric(12, 7),
    @longitude numeric(12, 7)

SET @latitude = 51.507351
SET @longitude = -0.127758

DECLARE @g geography = 'POINT(' + cast(@longitude as nvarchar) + ' ' + cast(@latitude as nvarchar) + ')';

And finally, lets see how far each of our offices is.

SELECT [Office_Name], 
       cast([Office_Location].STDistance(@g) / 1609.344 as numeric(10, 1)) as 'Distance (in miles)' 
FROM [Offices]
ORDER BY 2 ASC

And this gives us the results we were hoping for.

Obviously, you could slip in a TOP(1) if you just wanted to see the closest office.

Cool, hey ?

There's just one snag. When you have a lot of geography points to compare against, performance isn't brilliant, even if you add a SPATIAL INDEX on that database field.

I tested a point against a table of 330,000 geography points. Using the code shown here, it found the closest point in about 8 seconds.

When I modified my table to store the longitude and latitude values, and used the [dbo].[fnCalcDistanceMiles] function from this StackOverflow article, it found the closest point in about 3 seconds.

However...

All of the "distance between two points" samples I found on the internet either used the SQL Server STDistance function, or mathematical formulae involving the (CPU-intensive) cos, sin and tan functions.

A faster solution was to travel back in time to high school, and remember how Pythagoras calculated the distance between two points.

Supposing we wanted to know the distance between London and Paris.

And here's my SQL Server function:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[uf_CalculateDistance] (@Lat1 decimal(8,4), @Long1 decimal(8,4), @Lat2 decimal(8,4), @Long2 decimal(8,4))
RETURNS decimal (8,4) AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @d decimal(28,10)

    SET @d = sqrt(square(@Lat1-@Lat2) + square(@Long1-@Long2))

    RETURN @d
END

Now, remember this function doesn't return a value in miles, kilometers, etc... it's merely comparing the longitude & latitude values. And Pythagoras is meant to be used in 2D, and not comparing points on a round planet !

However, in my tests, it found the closest point within 1 second, and produced the same results as using SQL Server's STDistance function.

So, feel free to use this function for comparing relative distances, but don't use this function if you need the actual distance itself.

Hope all this helps.