What's the advantage of the inet datatype in Cassandra vs a plain text string? What is the inet datatype really for? The documentation refers to its usage having something to do with Python but I'm not much of a Python guy so that aspect is beyond me. Is there any advantage to using inet over just a plain text representation of an IP and what is it?

If its pertinent, I'm using PHP 5.6 and Apache Cassandra.
It's a special datatype for storing ip addresses. It would be more compact that the string representation of the same information as well as type safe.

inet    An IP address. It can be either 4 bytes long (IPv4) or 
16 bytes long (IPv6). There is no inet constant, 
IP address should be inputed as strings


https://cassandra.apache.org/doc/cql3/CQL.html