That's the real beauty of open source. Someone needed a MAC address column and hacked it in. And now everyone gets to use it. (Of course, it added to the testing and maintenance burden for the project. So I don't know if it was actually worthwhile.) - James Williams (willia4)
haven't used postgreSQL much but don't see the need, can't you just store as text and explode() ":" or "-" in the code? - Chris Harris
The only reason that I see for a specific MAC address data type is so you can easily make PostgreSQL functions that deal with the MAC address data type. http://www.postgresql.org/docs... shows one function that can be used with the macaddr data type. I still don't get the point of the data type. - possible248
In PostgreSQL, a binary string takes up an additional byte (I'm guessing it's a length indicator). Since a MAC address is always 6 bytes long, you can shave off that extra byte by using a specific datatype. Perhaps someone was working on a database that stored enough MAC addresses that the space-savings was worthwhile? - James Williams (willia4)
I don't know much about PostgreSQL, but wouldn't a fixed-length character string not have the extra byte? - possible248
One benefit is that it allows for various input formats, although this can easily be done on the app level. - Aviv
Encoding the MAC address as a binary string takes 6 bytes. Encoding it as a UTF8 hex string takes 12 bytes. (PostgreSQL stores characters as UTF8 or ASCII I think. I'm not sure on that, but I doubt its anything smaller than one-byte-per-hex-digit) - James Williams (willia4)
I find MAC addresses valuable in Asset tracking databases. Because of DHCP, IP addresses aren't unique, so if the IDS picks up something and I have a MAC address I have a better chance of tracking it down. - Victor Ryden
