Re: IP addresses

Steve Atkins wrote:
>
> On Nov 20, 2007, at 3:41 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>> "Sander Steffann" <s(dot)steffann(at)computel(dot)nl> writes:

>>> I would be happy if it would support IPv6 :-) Are there plans to make
>>> ip6r
>>> or something like that?
>>
>> What's the point? You might as well use the regular inet type if you
>> need to handle ipv6.
>
> ip4r's main advantage over inet is that it allows you to answer
> the question "is this IP address in any of these large number of
> address ranges" efficiently. It's useful for customer address
> allocation, email filtering blacklists, things like that.

Another advantage is that it's not varlena (this is less of a problem in
8.3 due to short varlenas, but having a fixed-length field is still
better).

--
Alvaro Herrera Valdivia, Chile ICBM: S 39º 49' 18.1", W 73º 13' 56.4"
"I must say, I am absolutely impressed with what pgsql's implementation of
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my code. Too bad I can't do this at work (Oracle 8/9)." (Tom Allison)
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2007-06/msg00016.php