And vast. IME, people often underestimate what it can do. For example, if you need to store IP addresses in a DB, you can use the stdlib library ipaddress to validate them, then store them as an INT, casting it back to dotted-quad with Python if needed.

Also, of course, Postgres has a native inet type, which performs validation and other operations, storing a v4 in 7 bytes – not quite as good as 4 bytes for an INT, but much better than the maximum 16 bytes to store a dotted-quad as a VARCHAR. But if you’ve got MySQL (or anything else without a native type), this is a solid way to save space – and more importantly, memory – that can add up over hundreds of millions of rows (session information for a large SaaS product, for example).