Postgis nearest coordinates - postgresql

Question

I'm trying to make a REST service that returns a list of places ordered by distance from the user coordinate. I found this query using postgis:
SELECT *
FROM your_table
ORDER BY your_table.geom <-> "your location..."
LIMIT 5;
But I'm not able to apply this to my actual database. I have a table that contains these columns:
title, address, description, latitude, longitude
all these values as Strings.
I'll be very happy if someone help me. Thx!

Answer 1

I dont know why, but ORDER BY <-> isnt exact. Sometime the closest link is on the 3rd position. So I get 101 element and then use distance to selected the closest one.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION map.get_near_link(
x numeric,
y numeric)
RETURNS TABLE(Link_ID int, distance int) AS
$BODY$
DECLARE
strPoint text;
BEGIN
strPoint = 'POINT('|| X || ' ' || Y || ')';
With CTE AS (
SELECT Link_ID,
TRUNC(ST_Distance(ST_GeomFromText(strPoint,4326), geom )*100000)::integer as distance
FROM map.vzla_seg S
ORDER BY
geom <-> ST_GeomFromText(strPoint, 4326)
LIMIT 101
)
SELECT *
FROM CTE
ORDER BY distance
LIMIT 5

Answer 2

In order to use PostGIS you have to enable the extension in the database. Ideally, you just run the CREATE EXTENSION postgis; command and it works. NOTE form the install page: DO NOT INSTALL it in the database called postgres. For more information visit the site.
Adding a geometry column (spatial data can be stored in this type of columns) to your table:
SELECT AddGeometryColumn(
'your_schema',
'your_table',
'geom', -- name of the column
4326, -- SRID, for GPS coordinates you can use this, for more information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_reference_system
'POINT', -- type of geometry eg. POINT, POLYGON etc.
2 -- number of dimension (2 xy - 3 xyz)
);
UPDATE yourtable t SET t.geom = ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(t.x, t.y), 4326)
-- the x and y is the latitude and longitude
Now you can use spatial queries on your table like this:
SELECT
*
FROM
your_table
ORDER BY
your_table.geom <-> ST_SetSRID(ST_MakePoint(x, y), 4326)
LIMIT 5;
NOTE: as others mentioned, below PostgreSQL 9.5 <-> isn't always reliable.