Joe, you're missing the point of what I said with respect to the IP address. While I agree with you that the four columns made more sense, it's a 3rd party application, not my design. I am guessing the database design (the second time around) was done by folks who were looking to do some obfuscation in order to sell their reporting piece (which wasn't very good). Since we were able to quickly determine it was a bitmask, we were able to quickly rewrite our queries to handle the change. And this isn't the only network-type application I've seen this practice with. So it is important to be able to understand bitmasks and hopefully recognize them when they are used in a database.