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6.9 Network Address Types

PostgreSQL offers data types to store IPv4, IPv6, and MAC addresses, as shown in Table 6-21. It is better to use these types instead of plain text types to store network addresses, because these types offer input error checking and specialized operators and functions (see section 7.12 Network Address Functions and Operators).

When sorting inet or cidr data types, IPv4 addresses will always sort before IPv6 addresses, including IPv4 addresses encapsulated or mapped to IPv6 addresses, such as ::10.2.3.4 or ::ffff:10.4.3.2.