Rails 3 Float or decimal for GPS coordinates

Question

I need to store GPS coordinates in a database. I\'ve heard that floats are less accurate than decimals. Is that true? If so, what reason is there to ever use floats?

Answer 1

As you can see in Paul's answer, it depends on your use-case.
A float provides a precision of roughly 6 decimal digits.
±11 cm is quite acceptable for, say, an address. and if you're displaying addresses it's unlikely that you are going to do any arithmetical operations that will compound rounding errors.