How to store a 128 bit number in a single column in MySQL?

I found myself asking this question and from all the posts I read never found any performance comparisons. So here’s my attempt.

I’ve created the following tables, populated with 2,000,000 random ip address from 100 random networks.

CREATE TABLE ipv6_address_binary (
    id SERIAL NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    addr BINARY(16) NOT NULL UNIQUE
);

CREATE TABLE ipv6_address_twobigints (
    id SERIAL NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    haddr BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
    laddr BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
    UNIQUE uidx (haddr, laddr)
);

CREATE TABLE ipv6_address_decimal (
    id SERIAL NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    addr DECIMAL(39,0) NOT NULL UNIQUE
);

Then I SELECT all ip addresses for each network and record the response time. Average response time on the twobigints table is about 1 second while on the binary table it is about one-hundredth of a second.

Here are the queries.

Note:

X_[HIGH/LOW] is the most/least significant 64-bits of X

when NETMASK_LOW is 0 the AND condition is omitted as it always yields true. doesn’t affect performance very much.

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ipv6_address_twobigints
WHERE haddr & NETMASK_HIGH = NETWORK_HIGH
AND laddr & NETMASK_LOW = NETWORK_LOW

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ipv6_address_binary
WHERE addr >= NETWORK
AND addr <= BROADCAST

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ipv6_address_decimal
WHERE addr >= NETWORK
AND addr <= BROADCAST

Average response times:

Graph:

BINARY_InnoDB  0.0119529819489
BINARY_MyISAM  0.0139244818687
DECIMAL_InnoDB 0.017379629612
DECIMAL_MyISAM 0.0179929423332
BIGINT_InnoDB  0.782350552082
BIGINT_MyISAM  1.07809265852