Good morning everyone,

I am designing a website which I need to use the IPv4 and IPv6 and order them in a database. Integer and floating point datatype seem not to be working because of the character "." in the IP addresses e.g 10.0.0.4.

Concatenating a prefix of "10.0.0" before the integer data type would not work too because IP address vary e.g there may be an ip address "10.20.0.4".

The only option was to use varchar which works perfectly but unfortunately varchar cannot order IP addresses the way it should be ordered.

When I googled, the data type to use, the BIT data type is said to be best but when I tried it although it worked but it changed the IP addresses to funny binary digits. I want to know maybe there is any other way around this. Thank you for your help.

I think your best option is still varchar.
And where do you want to sort the rows by IP? Is it I'm the dB or in your server side code?
If in the server code, you can retrieve the rows first and then order by IP in the code

Varchar should work. Create an array of strings containing all the IP addresses and sort the array.

varchar all the way, any value not meant for calculation should be saved as a string and char type

Codenister:
I think your best option is still varchar.
And where do you want to sort the rows by IP? Is it I'm the dB or in your server side code?
If in the server code, you can retrieve the rows first and then order by IP in the code

In the server side code. User would assign new IP addresses. So, even if sorted in the database it would still get unsorted after new IP address inputs.

Javanian:
Varchar should work. Create an array of strings containing all the IP addresses and sort the array.

I guess I have no other choice then than to go with VarChar.