Yes, some of the databases support native ip address types that can be manipulated efficiently. Better to use that (like inbuilt json querying capabilities in p

Yes, some of the databases support native ip address types that can be manipulated efficiently. Better to use that (like inbuilt json querying capabilities in postgres) than come up with your own. It is still not clear how is it better to do up to 5 separate queries or maybe a few joins, than to store the strings and construct indices and such on them? Is the idea that the cost of possibly establishing a new socket connection for some concurrent query execution or sequentially executing 5 queries is still < possible scans of the columns (even with indexing in effect)? Also, even if you had integers, don't you need some sort of an index on integer fields to avoid full table scans anyway?