PostgreSQL 11 Administration Cookbook

Real-world example – prefix ranges

Another common problem involves assigning credit card numbers or telephone numbers. For example, with credit card numbers, we may need to perform additional checking for certain financial institutions, assuming that each institution is assigned a given range. In that case, we must check efficiently if a given credit card number belongs to a certain range.

The prefix range data type has been specifically designed to address this class of problems. This is available as a PostgreSQL extension at http://github.com/dimitri/prefix.

A warning: despite the similar name, prefix ranges cannot be implemented as range types.