Kind of a geeky post, but I just spent some time trying to figure out what the max number of decimal values a Latitude or Longitude value can have for the sake of storing information in a database.

Here is what I found. Most places I found decimal values for Lat/Long only used up to 8 decimal places (depending on rounding), yet the most I found was 16 values to the right of the decimal place.

For those out there using mySQL and wanting to store these values I’m using the type: decimal(20,16) and while it will be overkill for some values, it should accommodate the extreme circumstances that arise.