How can I find all objects within a radius of another object?

There are a few ways to do a radius search, but the key here is to do an efficient search.

There is a function purpose-built for this query, ST_DWithin().

SELECT *
FROM mytable
WHERE ST_DWithin(geom, 'POINT(1000 1000)', 100.0)

The “DWithin” stands for “within distance”. You could form the same query using ST_Distance(), but it would run much slower, because there is no way for such a query to leverage a spatial index.

Another approach is to use the ST_Intersects() and ST_Buffer() functions together like this.

SELECT *
FROM mytable
WHERE ST_Intersects(ST_Buffer(geom, 100.0), 'POINT(1000 1000)')

This will also work and return the same results as the other approaches, but is frequently slower, because constructive functions like ST_Buffer()](docs/ST_Buffer.html) can be very expensive. However, sometimes for cases with a complex literal on one side that gets buffered, and a simple test set like a table of points, the buffer approach can actually be faster than ST_DWithin().