What type should I store IP addresses for MySQL?

Question

I was going to use varchar(20), but I was wondering what should if I should do INT and strip off the periods instead. What would be better and why?

Answer 1

I presume you're only interested in IPv4 addresses, not IPv6.

I would use an INT UNSIGNED for the column, and then use INET_ATON and INET_NTOA to convert back and forth between the textual representation and the int value.

mysql> SELECT INET_ATON('192.168.10.50');
+----------------------------+
| INET_ATON('192.168.10.50') |
+----------------------------+
|                 3232238130 |
+----------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT INET_NTOA(3232238130);
+-----------------------+
| INET_NTOA(3232238130) |
+-----------------------+
| 192.168.10.50         |
+-----------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Answer 2

If you're really concerned about saving space, you can pack it into a 4-byte int. Each block of an IPv4 IP address can have 256 possible values, which just happens to be the range of a single byte.

-- Edit --> What I just described can be done with the mysql functions f00 linked in his answer

However, storing it as a string will save a bit of coding time. Honestly, unless you're doing this on a very large scale, the optimization from a denser storage format won't matter.

Answer 3

store IPV4 as int unsigned

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/miscellaneous-functions.html#function_inet-aton

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/miscellaneous-functions.html#function_inet-ntoa