I was asked today to confirm the operation of INET_ATON() and INET_NTOA() functions for converting IP4 strings to numeric representations. My tests on the machine I was just connected to at the very instant reported the following results.

mysql> SELECT VERSION();
+-----------------+
| VERSION()       |
+-----------------+
| 5.1.31-1ubuntu2 |
+-----------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT INET_ATON('74.165.97.204') AS ipn;
+------------+
| ipn        |
+------------+
| 1252352460 |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT INET_NTOA(1252352460) as ipa;
+---------------+
| ipa           |
+---------------+
| 74.165.97.204 |
+---------------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)

The results on the client via ODBC using MySQL 5.0.45 was?

ipn
1252352460

ipa
37342E3136352E39372E323034

What is causing this? It was immediately suspicious the pattern of 2E (the only letter), which translates from Hex to decimal …

I have been spending a few days looking into optimisation for a few of our products, the biggest of which is Intellichat, which this great MySQL function is soon to be used for. Intellichat handles thousands of chats every hour, we average at about 190,000 chats a day, which is increasing daily. Every one of these chats holds information about the chat, from the Agent name, through the the IP address that launched the chat. This data allows us to provide detailed statistics to our customers from which Agent name converts best to which Country generates the most sales for their product.

*** Please note that all data sizes below are taken from the PHPMyAdmin row size and not the individual data size as listed in the mysql manual ***

Since starting out, I had always used a char(15) which uses 16 bytes to store ’192.168.0.1′. Since …