An Awesome One-Liner for PostgreSQL

Recently I was looking at options for exploring CIDR blocks in PostgreSQL.  In particular, I was wondering about checking a CIDR block for unallocated IP addresses in another table.

I had been aware of network address types in PostgreSQL for some time but had not been aware of how powerful they actually were.  I decided to write a function to expand a CIDR bock into a list of IP blocks.  While my initial version wasn't perfect (it includes network and broadcast addresses in the block), changing that will not be hard.

The first version was:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION all_ips(cidr)
RETURNS SETOF inet LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE AS
$$
 select $1 + s from generate_series(0,  broadcast($1) - network($1)) s;
$$;

That's it.

To exclude network and broadcast addresses, two simple modifications are required:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION all_ips(cidr)
RETURNS SETOF inet LANGUAGE SQL IMMUTABLE AS
$$
 select $1 + s from generate_series(1,  broadcast($1) - (network($1)) - 1) s;
$$;

And there you have it.  It is fast, or at least as fast as can be expected.

mq_test=# explain analyze
mq_test-# select all_ips('192.168.1.0/24');
                                      QUERY PLAN                               
     
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
 Result  (cost=0.00..0.26 rows=1 width=0) (actual time=0.213..0.511 rows=254 loo
ps=1)
 Total runtime: 0.580 ms
(2 rows)

Ok, not so much for 10.0.0.0/8.....

                                            QUERY PLAN                         
                 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------
 Result  (cost=0.00..0.26 rows=1 width=0) (actual time=5977.386..32370.877 rows=
16777214 loops=1)
 Total runtime: 37185.476 ms
(2 rows)

But what do you expect for generating almost 17 million rows?