On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 04:32:05PM -0500, Michael Stone wrote:
On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 03:19:35PM -0500, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
Besides, there are many cases where you want to track both ipv4 and
ipv6 for the same purpose and requiring two different fields would be
less than ideal.
And, there are many cases where you don't. I've got two kinds of db's
that have IPs in them. In some, the IP is a small part of a table which
is focused on something else. For those I use inet, which provides a
nice bit of future-proofing. In other db's the IPs are the primary
focus. There are lots and lots of IPs, and the space used by IPs may be
the largest chunk of a particular table. For those tables, I don't use
inet because the overhead really is a significant fraction of the space.
Oh, yeah, the latter type also has seperate IPv4 and IPv6 tables,
because there's no point in bloating 99% of the data for the 1% that's
IPv6. Is that a niche requirement? Maybe--but I think that storing
netmasks is even *more* of a niche...
I'm not arguing for the removal of inet, but I do think there's room for
more than one type--and I certainly think its nuts to pretend that inet
can meet every requirement well.
Mike Stone
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