A user signs up for my site and enters in their zip code. I want to query for other users, and sort by distance.
I have a database full of zip codes with lat/lon points for each zip code.
zip_code (char)
lat (float)
lon (float)
I have a method which will calculate the distance between two sets of lat/lons, but to run this on every other zip code in my db is expensive. I'd need to run this on every zip code combination. I suppose I can do it once and store it somewhere, but where would I store it? Seems strange to have a table for every zip code which would contain the distance to every other zip code. Is there a clean way to do this?