Greetings

Now what do you suppose might be the most appropriate data type for
storing an IP-Address?

Thoughts (considered and/or random) most welsome.

Cheers
--
William Tasso

__/ [ William Tasso ] on Friday 17 March 2006 17:49 \__

IP addresses are essentially bits, but to use some abstracting, go with
numbers. Strings will not allow you to manipulate the data much (unless
converted to numbers, which needs string validation). For example, think of
operations like "find all IP address on the same subnet (e.g. C-block).

Also remember IPv6, so leave enough space for that. Look at existing systems
for inspiration. WordPress is the only one which I am sufficiently familiar
with. I have just run phpMyAdmin. WordPress stores IP addresses as follows:

Field Attributes Null
comment_author_IP varchar(100) No

You are very welsome (sic) *smile*,

Roy

--
Roy S. Schestowitz | "In hell, treason is the work of angels"
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
5:50pm up 9 days 10:27, 7 users, load average: 0.25, 0.36, 0.45
http://iuron.com - Open Source knowledge engine project

And lo, William Tasso didst speak in alt.www.webmaster:

Emphasis on convenience or table space? Personally, I would just store
them as text, but zero-fill each octet so that the column can be easily
sorted. That would make for 15 bytes an entry, but you could even do away
with the dots if you zero-fill, leaving 12 bytes. You could even reduce
this to a (theoretical) maximum of 39 bits by storing the collapsed IP as
an integer.

If you're aiming for space, you could convert it natively to decimal and
store it in a (again theoretical) maximum of 33 bits. It would still sort
nicely this way, but you'd need to translate it with a mathematical
algorithm going in and out.

Just some ideas.

Grey

--
The technical axiom that nothing is impossible sinisterly implies the
pitfall corollary that nothing is ridiculous.
- http://www.greywyvern.com/orca#search - Orca Search: Full-featured
spider and site-search engine

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 17:49:11 -0000, "William Tasso"
<SpamBlocked@tbdata.com> wrote:

Run length encoded decimal.

<BG>

Matt

PS

What's "welsome" ? I thought I had the copyright on typos here?

PPS

More seriously, it depends on how you want to access the data (you
already know that) but I like text, so I'd use a fixed length text
field.

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 17:49:11 -0000, William Tasso put finger to
keyboard and typed:

Depends on what you want to do with the information. If it's primarily
intended to be human-readable (eg, as a log file), then CHAR(16) or
VARCHAR(16) is the obvious choice. If you want to do any kind of
mathematical manipulation, then converting it to decimal before
storing it in an INT UNSIGNED field might be more useful.

Mark
--
Visit: http://www.GoogleFun.info - fun and games with Google!
Listen: http://www.goodge.co.uk/files/dweeb.mp3 - you'll love it!

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 17:49:11 -0000
"William Tasso" <SpamBlocked@tbdata.com> opined:
(INET_ATON(dot-quad-IP)). This provides the most functionality IMO
including indexing on them and sorting them. I reverse them for octet
presentation with INET_NTOA(integer).

--
Displayed Email Address is a SPAM TRAP
Our DNSRBL -
Eliminate Spam: http://www.TQMcube.com
Multi-RBL Check: http://www.TQMcube.com/rblcheck.php
Zombie Graphs: http://www.TQMcube.com/zombies.php

"William Tasso" <SpamBlocked@tbdata.com> wrote in message
newsp.s6kjr9n2m9g4qz-wnt@tbdata.com...
I think the other replies have probably covered everything.

For what its worth, I store it as a string, but that's just for convenience
and its for a system with a low number of records. If I needed to store it
for a system with lots of records then I'd use an integer type. No idea how
I'd store an IPv6 address (a string would be very tempting), but I've not
needed to cross that hurdle.
--
Brian Cryer
www.cryer.co.uk/brian

Fleeing from the madness of the Chaos jungle
William Tasso <SpamBlocked@tbdata.com> stumbled into news:alt.www.webmaster
and said:

Thanks all - fwiw: I decided (for now, at least) to store them as
datatype:string

To address some of the points raised ....
o storage space is not a concern here
o usage will be low
o the number of addresses is finite and each will constrained to a
'network'
o IPv6 - I'll do what every other system does - add an extra column

Cheers
--
William Tasso