What are some best practices for storing and managing IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in MySQL databases?

When storing and managing IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in MySQL databases, it is important to use the appropriate data types to ensure efficient storage and retrieval. For IPv4 addresses, the INET_ATON() and INET_NTOA() functions can be used to convert the IP address to an integer for storage and vice versa for retrieval. For IPv6 addresses, the VARBINARY(16) data type can be used to store the address in binary format.

// Storing IPv4 address in MySQL database
$ipv4_address = '192.168.1.1';
$ipv4_int = ip2long($ipv4_address);

// Inserting into database
$query = "INSERT INTO table_name (ipv4_address) VALUES (INET_ATON('$ipv4_address'))";
mysqli_query($connection, $query);

// Retrieving from database
$query = "SELECT INET_NTOA(ipv4_address) AS ipv4_address FROM table_name";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);
$row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result);
$ipv4_address = $row['ipv4_address'];
```

```php
// Storing IPv6 address in MySQL database
$ipv6_address = '2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334';
$ipv6_binary = inet_pton($ipv6_address);

// Inserting into database
$query = "INSERT INTO table_name (ipv6_address) VALUES (?)";
$stmt = mysqli_prepare($connection, $query);
mysqli_stmt_bind_param($stmt, 's', $ipv6_binary);
mysqli_stmt_execute($stmt);

// Retrieving from database
$query = "SELECT INET6_NTOA(ipv6_address) AS ipv6_address FROM table_name";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);
$row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result);
$ipv6_address = $row['ipv6_address'];