This user-defined function (only available in SQL 2000 and above) is part of a larger project I'm working on. PARSENAME in SQL Server is my new favorite function.. Thanks to Jeff Smith for the heads up.
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[IPtoNumeric] (@strIP varchar(255))
RETURNS bigint
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @intIPNum bigint
IF (LEN(@strIP)-LEN(REPLACE(@strIP,'.','')))/LEN('.') = 3 -- check to ensure there are 3 dots
SET @intIPNum = (16777216 * CAST(PARSENAME(@strIP,4) as bigint) + 65536 * PARSENAME(@strIP,3) + 256 * PARSENAME(@strIP,2) + PARSENAME(@strIP,1))
RETURN @intIPNum
END
You can quickly test this by issuing the following query:
SELECT dbo.IPtoNumeric('24.0.175.222') as numericIP