Question

I am attempting to use Entity Framework and have a contact database that has Longitude and Latitude data from Google Maps.

The guide says that this should be stored as float.

I have created my POCO entity which includes Longitude as a float and Latitude as a float.

I have just noticed that in the database, these both come up as real.

There is still a lot of work to be done before I can get any data back from Google, I am very far away from testing and I was just wondering if anyone can tell me if this is going to be a problem later on?

Answer 1

Nope, that should be fine. Note that you may not get the exact same value back as you received from Google Maps, as that would have been expressed in decimal-formatted text. However, this is effectively a physical quantity, and thus more appropriate as a float/double/real/(whatever binary floating point type you like) than as a decimal. (Decimals are more appropriate for man-made quantities – particularly currency.)

If you look at the documentation for float and real you’ll see that real is effectively float(24) – a 32-bit floating binary point type, just like float in C#.

EDIT: As noted in comments, if you want more than the significant 7-8 digits of accuracy provided by float, then you probably want double instead in C#, which would mean float(53) in SQL Server.