Thread:Talk:Requests for comment/Native geospatial data types/From GeoData developer/reply (2)

Heh, I was under impression that InnoDB supports it since 5.5, however it indeed added only FULLTEXT index support, not SPATIAL. Then the situation changes: what do you need spatial indexes for? They indeed cause less I/O, however in practice tiled search works as good if you keep geo_tags hot and don't have too many coordinates stored. And if you need to search through the number of points comparable with English Wikipedia, you will need a specialised solution anyway. So you have pros of spatial indexes: And cons:
 * No kludges.
 * Faster.
 * Slower updates. Spatial indexes are ridiculously slow to update with ~1M rows in my experience.
 * MyISAM is crashy.
 * MyISAM is not replication-friendly.