What is the ideal data type to use when storing latitude / longitude in a MySQL database?

Question

Bearing in mind that I\'ll be performing calculations on lat / long pairs, what datatype is best suited for use with a MySQL database?

Answer 1

Use MySQL's spatial extensions with GIS.

Answer 2

depending on you application, i suggest using FLOAT(9,6)

spatial keys will give you more features, but in by production benchmarks the floats are much faster than the spatial keys. (0,01 VS 0,001 in AVG)

Answer 3

I suggest you use Float datatype for SQL Server.

Answer 4

MySQL uses double for all floats ... So use type double. Using float will lead to unpredictable rounded values in most situations

Answer 5

1. Latitudes range from -90 to +90 (degrees), so DECIMAL(10, 8) is ok for that

2. longitudes range from -180 to +180 (degrees) so you need DECIMAL(11, 8).

Note: The first number is the total number of digits stored, and the second is the number after the decimal point.

In short: lat DECIMAL(10, 8) NOT NULL, lng DECIMAL(11, 8) NOT NULL

Answer 6

The ideal datatype for storing Lat Long values is decimal(9,6)

This is at approximately 10cm precision, whilst only using 5 bytes of storage.

e.g. CAST(123.456789 as decimal(9,6))