On 2006-01-25, Greg Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have a question in a different direction. What is the meaning of the > network mask in the inet data type anyways? Hosts don't have network masks, > only networks.
As far as I can tell, the "inet" semantics are supposed to represent a network interface, rather than just an address. So it designates a network and a host within that network. This is a significant semantic overload, which is not relevent to many applications and may be counterproductive (for example, if you had a database of hosts and networks, the network info would more correctly be accessed via a reference to a separate table than embedded in the host address). > If we could store inet in four bytes it would be vastly more efficient both > in disk space usage and in cpu at runtime. That's not reasonable for inet/cidr due to the need to support ipv6. If you want that for ip4-only apps, that's why pgfoundry.org/projects/ip4r exists. It is possible that ip4r will be extended to ipv6 addresses, but most unlikely that it will ever implement the overloaded "inet" semantics. -- Andrew, Supernews http://www.supernews.com - individual and corporate NNTP services ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
