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)