How can I migrate from "float" to "points" in MySQL?

Question

I'm looking for a faster way to calculate Euclidean distances in SQL.

Problem I want to solve

The following "Euclidean distance calculation" is slow.

SELECT 
  id,
  sqrt(
    power(f1 - (-0.09077361), 2) +
    power(f2 - (0.10373443), 2) +
    ...
    ...
    power(f127 - (0.0778369), 2) +
    power(f128 - (0.00951046), 2)
  ) as distance
FROM 
  face_feature
ORDER BY 
  distance
LIMIT
  1
;

What I want to know

Can you share how to migrate from "float" to "points"?

I received the following advice, but I don't understand how.

Switch to POINTs and a SPATIAL index. It may be possible your task orders of magnitude faster.

MySQL

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%version%';
+--------------------------+------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                        |
+--------------------------+------------------------------+
| version                  | 8.0.29                       |
| version_comment          | MySQL Community Server - GPL |
| version_compile_machine  | x86_64                       |
| version_compile_os       | Linux                        |
+--------------------------+------------------------------+

Table

mysql> desc face_feature;
+-------+------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field | Type       | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+-------+------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id    | int        | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| f1    | float(9,8) | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| f2    | float(9,8) | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
..
| f127  | float(9,8) | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
| f128  | float(9,8) | NO   |     | NULL    |                |
+-------+------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+

Data

mysql> SELECT count(*) FROM face_feature;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|   100003 |
+----------+

mysql> SELECT * FROM face_feature LIMIT 1\G;
  id: 1
  f1: -0.07603023
  f2: 0.13605964
  ...
  f127: 0.09608927
  f128: 0.00082345

Reference (My other question)

How can I make "euclidean distance calculation" faster in MySQL?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 30 '22 at 15:36

Don't use FLOAT(M,N) it adds an extra rounding that only hurts various operations.
FLOAT(9,8), if the numbers are near "1.0" will lose some precision. This is because there are only 24 bits of precision in any FLOAT.
(m,n) on FLOAT and DOUBLE has been deprecated (as useless and misleading) in newer versions of MySQL.
There are helper functions to convert numeric strings to POINT values. Internally, a POINT contains two DOUBLEs. Hence the original DECIMAL(9,8) loses only a round-from-decimal-to-binary at the 53rd significant bit.

But the real question is about using SPATIAL indexing when the universe has 128 dimensions. I don't think it will work. (I have not even heard of using SPATIAL for 3 dimensions, though it should be practical.)

How can I migrate from "float" to "points" in MySQL?

1 Answers1

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