Hello
I wonder if anyone can help.

I would like to know how certain sites:
http://aboutbritain.com/ArundelCastle.htm, and
http://travel.knowhere.co.uk/place/+bristol-0/ manage to put approx mile
distances between their listed towns and attractions.
You will see it on the knowhere.co.uk site on the right side where they list
nearby towns and on aboutbritain.com you will see it where they list other
nearby attractions and hotels towards the bottom of the page.
I guess they store longitude/latitude in their database so they can pinpoint
each attraction/hotel ETC, but what then. How do they calculate distances
between those hotels and attractions and other towns?

Also, the database on my site has alot of places stored but with postcodes.
Is there a way of converting postcodes into approximate long/lat positions?
Like a universally available table or something?

My programmer is back tomorrow from his holidays and I'm trying to gather as
much information about 'how it's done' so I can get a similiar system
implemented on my website. My new website will be describing thousands of
British villages and storing them in a mySQL database and I'm looking at
ways of listing the nearest attractions to them. The site uses alot of php.
If my programmer does not contact me on his return (he often obsconds for
lengthy periods) I will be looking for someone who can do this sort of work
and other work. Must be reasonable! and reliable!

If anyone can help I'd be most grateful.

Kind Regards,
Jayne Wolps

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004 13:13:19 +0000, Jayne Wolps wrote:

How about deciding the DBMS product _after_ surveying what products best
fit your requirements? The other way around (your methology) seems
irrational at best.

You explicitly said that your requirements included geometric/GIS-like
features. MySQL is not strong in that area yet, however a product like
PostgreSQL is. It has built-in types, operators, functions, and index
types relevant to the problem domain; and if that's not enough, you may
add PostGIS.

PostgreSQL's geometric types:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/s...geometric.html

PostgreSQL's geometric operators and functions:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/s...-geometry.html

PostgreSQL's index types:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.4/s...xes-types.html

PostGIS:
http://postgis.refractions.net/

If you cannot use PostgreSQL for some reason, I'm sure that other DBMSes
offer relevant data-types/operators/index-types.

--
Greetings from Troels Arvin, Copenhagen, Denmark