Minimum distance of a location; one table of points compared to a set of points SQL 2012

I am trying to find the quickest way to find the minimum distance of one point to a table of points. The only caveat is that the table of the points I'm trying to find the minimum distance of is 150K single points.

Or better explained Table A has 150K rows/points, Table B 1500 points. I want to know for every row in Table A what is the minimum distance from all those listed in Table B.

I have a function that does the distance calc, as an added column to the Table A. It just takes a VERY LONG time. Table B has a spatial index.

This is what I have:

select a.*, 
       dbo.fxn_distance(geography::STPointFromText('POINT(' + 
       CAST([Long] AS VARCHAR(20)) + ' ' + CAST([Lat] AS 
       VARCHAR(20)) +    ')', 4326)) as DistAway
from Table A a

my function:

create function fxn_distance
(@pointTableA geography
)
returns float 
as 
begin

declare @distance float

select top 1 @distance = b.GeoLocation.STDistance(@pointTableA) 
from TableB b  
where geolocation.STDistance(@pointTableA) is not null
order by geolocation.STDistance(@pointTableA)

return @distance
end

Sorry if I am totally a newbie to this, and I know the solution is probably simple, but I just can't wrap my head around this. So to hopefully clarify: I need to pass the lat/long of every point in Table A and see what the min distance is compared to every row in Table B, for every row in Table A. I care what the actual distance away is, but not the actual point from Table B.

Any help appreciated.

You may have better performance if you convert the function into a table-valued-function.

Here, I setup the test-bed:

USE tempdb;
CREATE TABLE dbo.TableA
(
    LAT DECIMAL(10,5)
    , LON DECIMAL(10,5)
);

CREATE TABLE TableB
(
    Geolocation GEOGRAPHY NOT NULL
);
GO

Here is the table-valued-function, which is basically your function except this returns a table.

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.fxn_distance
(
    @pointTableA GEOGRAPHY
)
returns table
as return 
(
    SELECT TOP 1 Distance = b.GeoLocation.STDistance(@pointTableA) 
    FROM TableB b  
    WHERE geolocation.STDistance(@pointTableA) IS NOT NULL
    ORDER BY geolocation.STDistance(@pointTableA)
)
GO

Insert a simple test-row into each of the two tables:

INSERT INTO dbo.TableA(LAT, LON)
VALUES (49.0,170.0);

INSERT INTO dbo.TableB(Geolocation)
VALUES (geography::STGeomFromText(
    'LINESTRING(-122.360 47.656, -122.343 47.656)', 4326)
);

The query that uses the inline TVF to determine the closest point:

SELECT a.*
    , d.Distance --This is the distance calculated by the TVF. 
FROM dbo.TableA a
CROSS APPLY dbo.fxn_distance(geography::STPointFromText('POINT(' + 
       CAST(A.LON AS VARCHAR(20)) + ' ' + CAST(A.LAT AS 
       VARCHAR(20)) + ')', 4326)) d ;

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#121040, answer score: 3