title: Latitude and Longitude MySQL Field Type
body: <p>I have a large set of Latitude and Longitude that I need to store in a MySQL database.  I am reading conflicting advice on the field type to use.</p>
  
  <p>An example of the data is...</p>
  
  <pre><code>Lat        |  Long
  ------------------------
  53.670827  |  -1.093991
  50.894701  |  0.061115
  52.288213  |  -1.822060
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>According to <a href="https://developers.google.com/maps/articles/phpsqlsearch_v3?csw=1" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this document</a> from Google, they recommend the field type to be FLOAT(10,6)</p>
  
  <p>I have tried this and when entering <strong>57.098554</strong> it gets changed to <strong>57.098553</strong>, however entering <strong>-2.252504</strong> stores correctly.</p>
  
  <p>As an alternative, I was planning on using the following...</p>
  
  <pre><code>Lat DECIMAL(10, 8)
  Long DECIMAL(11,8)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Does anybody have a better suggestion or am I right with the DECIMAL settings?</p>