How to store and search for an IP Address

Question

I have the 4 sources of IP addresses , I want to store them in SQL Server and allow the ranges, that can be categorised by the originating country code, to be maked in an E

Answer 1

I have never attempted this, so take my answer with a grain of salt, but I think a trie isn't actually what you want unless you intend to store every single IP you want to block (as opposed to ranges or subnets/masks). I think a btree would be better suited, in which case, just go ahead and use your regular database (many databases are implemented with btrees or equally good data structures). I'd store each of the 4 bytes of the IP in a separate column to aide in searching by class A/B/C subnets with "don't care" values equal to NULL, but there's no reason why you couldn't store it as a single 32 bit integer column and crunch the numbers to figure out what range it should fall into (storing masked-out values would be marginally more tricky in this case).