Find closest match from 2 columns in postgresql

I have a table "ways" containing coordinates (lat/lon) values. Suppose I have a coordinate (x,y) and I want to check the closest match from the table ways. I have seen some similar questions like this: Is there a postgres CLOSEST operator?

However in my case I have 2 columns instead of 1. Is there a query to do something like this this ?

You could store the data as PostGIS 'point' type instead of coordinate values:

• https://postgis.net/docs/ST_MakePoint.html
• https://postgis.net/docs/ST_GeomFromText.html

This would empower you with all the PostGIS functionality such as:

• https://postgis.net/docs/ST_DWithin.html

Then you could create a GiST index and use the PostGIS <-> operator to take advantage of index assisted nearest neighbor result sets. The 'nearest neighbor' functionality is pretty common. Here is a great explanation:

• https://postgis.net/workshops/postgis-intro/knn.html

“KNN” stands for “K nearest neighbours”, where “K” is the number of neighbours you are looking for.

KNN is a pure index based nearest neighbour search. By walking up and down the index, the search can find the nearest candidate geometries without using any magical search radius numbers, so the technique is suitable and high performance even for very large tables with highly variable data densities.