Storing network addresses and Mac addresses in the database is not terribly common, but honestly, it's not that uncommon. If you ever need to store stuff like this, this is going to be much more efficient the way that we're about to look at. It's gonna be much more efficient than just using a text representation, not only in storage space, but also inefficiency when querying. We can actually just search for ranges or we can pull off parts of some of these addresses without having to parse the text.

So we're gonna look at CIDR, we're gonna look at INET and we're gonna look at MAC addresses. Let's take a look.

We're gonna start with the INET examples. We're just gonna say that IP address is an INET, and I'm gonna copy all of this 'cause you certainly don't wanna watch me type all of this in. We have several different styles of address that we can put in there. Some are just the host address, some have the subnet mask, some are IPv6. We can run that. If we were to just read back, select * from inet_examples; and take a look at that, totally works just fine.

One thing I do wanna show you is, if we take a look at this as text and we were to say, let's call this pg_column_size, and we take a look at that, it is 40 bytes as text. However, if we were to cast this back to an INET, you'll see it is much smaller at 22 bytes. There is an actual underlying data structure here that is not text and it is much more compact and we can do operations on it, not only on IPv6, but IPv4, IPv4 subnet.

We can do operations on all of these things, which is part of the reason if you think all the way back to the beginning to pick the data type that most accurately represents the reality. In reality, this is not a string. This is not a string, this is an IP address and there is a data structure that can represent that accurately. Let's look at some of the functions that we can run on these things. Now my networking skills are a little bit rusty, so we're not gonna go into great depth about all of these functions. But if we look, we have host, mask length, network, and abbreviation, and we see that that works just perfectly. We have the host only, which has dropped the mask, and then we have the mask length, we have the network only and where possible and abbreviated IP. This is pretty cool. This also allows us to do quicker lookups when we talk about figuring out if an IP is in a certain range.

When it comes to ranges, we're probably gonna want to use the CIDR type, C-I-D-R. We're probably gonna want to use that type. Let's take a look at that now. The type is just CIDR, and we'll go ahead and create this table. And then I'm just gonna drop these in here. You have a network IPv4, a larger IPv4, and an IPv6 network. When we get down to the querying section of this course, we'll look at a few things that we can do with network addresses, but right now, I just wanna show you, they are all retained. If we do cidr_examples, we've got all of our data in there. And again, these are stored in a non-text representation, which makes them more compact and easier to operate on.

Finally, let's look at Mac addresses. This is probably only useful to like four of you, so we're just gonna kinda breeze through it, but it is kinda cool. With Mac addresses, you have two options. If we have that, you can cast it to a Mac address, which is the 6-byte version, or you can cast it to the 8-byte version. If we did pg_column_size here and took a look at that, that is the 8-byte version. That is the 6-byte version.

Some Mac addresses require the 8-byte version, but you can cast the 6 to an 8, and it should be just fine. The 8 can store the 6, or the 8 if you have an 8-byte version, you need to use the 8. Now let's see what this looks like. Text, much, much larger, much larger as text 21 versus, in this case, six or eight. So again, that's gonna be way more compact. These are kinda fun types to talk about. They're incredibly useful if you actually need to use them. But regardless is kind of fun.

I love this esoteric stuff. If you have a use case for this, please reach for these types. Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed that.