My goal is to use mysql POINT(lat,long) to find nearby entities in the database. I'm trying to do something like in the bottom of this tutorial http://www.scribd.com/doc/2569355/Geo-Distance-Search-with-MySQL . Here is what I have got:
Table:
CREATE TABLE mark (
id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(20) DEFAULT NULL,
loc POINT NOT NULL,
SPATIAL KEY loc (loc)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;
Inserting some test-data:
 INSERT INTO mark (loc,name) VALUES (POINT(59.388433,10.415039), 'Somewhere 1');
 INSERT INTO mark (loc,name) VALUES (POINT(63.41972,10.39856), 'Somewhere 2');
Declaring the distance function:
 DELIMITER $$
 CREATE FUNCTION `distance`
 (a POINT, b POINT)
 RETURNS double DETERMINISTIC
 BEGIN
 RETURN
 round(glength(linestringfromwkb(linestring(asbinary(a),
 asbinary(b)))));
 END $$
 DELIMITER;     
Trying to use the function to search ex.:
 SELECT name, distance(mark.loc, GeomFromText( ' POINT(31.5 42.2) ' )) AS cdist
 FROM mark
 ORDER BY
 cdist limit 10;
or:
 SELECT DISTINCT
 dest.name,
 distance(orig.loc, dest.loc) as sdistance
 FROM
 mark orig,
 mark dest
 having sdistance < 10
 ORDER BY
 sdistance limit 10;
The problem I am getting is: ERROR 1367 (22007): Illegal non geometric 'aswkb(a@0)' value found during parsing, or ERROR 1416 (22003): Cannot get geometry object from data you send to the GEOMETRY field
I can not seem to figure out how to solve this. The important thing is that the 'distance' function can be used dynamically.
I have also tried this solution: Find the distance between two points in MYSQL. (using the Point Datatype)
This is my mysql version mysql Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.23, for Linux (x86_64) using readline 5.1
Hope someones expertise can help me. Cheers!