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

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))