Mysql Spatial extension

So i have these records in my db with lat/long. I'd like to be able to query for records that are near some specific a lat/long. So I started to look around for a solution for that and it seem to point to use mysql spatial extension.

Reading this documentation http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-spatial-datatypes.html

Is a Point correspond to lat/long开发者_开发知识库? If it's not, what is it? and how do i convert it to a Point?

A Point in MySQL is a lat/long pair. I would suggest looking at this first:

http://janmatuschek.de/LatitudeLongitudeBoundingCoordinates