A friend is busy putting together a kick ass startup with a strong geographic component. He’s using Google Maps API version 3 which is a vast improvement (and total rewrite) from previous versions. But he needs to store and query his geographic data in a fast efficient way. There are many options out there, but if you want massive speed and scaleability you really want to use MySQL. So I’m writing this quickstart guide for his (and your) benefit.
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