For IPv4 addresses, you may want to store them as an int unsigned
and use the INET_ATON()
and INET_NTOA()
functions to return the IP address from its numeric value, and vice versa.
Example:
SELECT INET_ATON('127.0.0.1');
+------------------------+
| INET_ATON('127.0.0.1') |
+------------------------+
| 2130706433 |
+------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
SELECT INET_NTOA('2130706433');
+-------------------------+
| INET_NTOA('2130706433') |
+-------------------------+
| 127.0.0.1 |
+-------------------------+
1 row in set (0.02 sec)