// Copyright (C) 2012-2022 Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. ("ISC")
//
// This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
// License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
// file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/.
/**
@page dhcpDatabaseBackends DHCP Database Back-Ends
All DHCP lease data is stored in some form of database, the interface
to this being through the Lease Manager.
All backend classes such as isc::dhcp::MySqlLeaseMgr are derived from
the abstract isc::dhcp::LeaseMgr class. This provides methods to
create, retrieve, modify and delete leases in the database.
There are currently three available Lease Managers, Memfile, MySQL and
PostgreSQL:
- Memfile is an in-memory lease database which can be configured to persist
its content to disk in a flat-file. Support for the Memfile database
backend is built into Kea DHCP.
- The MySQL lease manager uses the freely available MySQL as its backend
database. This is not included in Kea DHCP by default:
the \--with-mysql switch must be supplied to "configure" for support
to be compiled into the software.
- The PostgreSQL lease manager uses the freely available PostgreSQL as its
backend database. This is not included in Kea DHCP by default:
the \--with-pgsql switch must be supplied to "configure" for
support to be compiled into the software.
@section dhcpdb-instantiation Instantiation of Lease Managers
A lease manager is instantiated through the @c LeaseMgrFactory class. This
has three methods:
- isc::dhcp::LeaseMgrFactory::create - Creates a singleton Lease
Manager of the appropriate type.
- isc::dhcp::LeaseMgrFactory::instance - Returns a reference to the
the instance of the Lease Manager.
- isc::dhcp::LeaseMgrFactory::destroy - Destroys the singleton lease manager.
The selection of the Lease Manager (and thus the backend database) is
controlled by the connection string passed to
isc::dhcp::LeaseMgrFactory::create. This is a set of "keyword=value" pairs
(no embedded spaces), each pair separated by a space from the others, e.g.
\code
type=mysql user=keatest password=keatest name=keatest host=localhost
\endcode
The following keywords are used for all backends:
- type - specifies the type of database backend. The following values
for the type keyword are supported:
- memfile - In-memory database.
- mysql - Use MySQL as the database. Must be enabled at compilation
time.
- postgresql - Use PostgreSQL as the database. Must be enabled
at compilation time.
The following sections list the database-specific keywords:
@subsection dhcpdb-keywords-mysql MySQL connection string keywords
- host - host on which the selected database is running. If not
supplied, "localhost" is assumed.
- name - name of the MySQL database to access. There is no default -
this must always be supplied.
- password - password for the selected user ID (see below). If not
specified, no password is used.
- user - database user ID under which the database is accessed. If not
specified, no user ID is used - the database is assumed to be open.
For details, see @ref isc::db::MySqlConnection::openDatabase().
@subsection dhcpdb-keywords-pgsql PostgreSQL connection string keywords
- host - host on which the selected database is running. If not
supplied, "localhost" is assumed.
- name - name of the PostgreSQL database to access. There is no
default - this must always be supplied.
- password - password for the selected user ID (see below). If not
specified, no password is used.
- user - database user ID under which the database is accessed. If not
specified, no user ID is used - the database is assumed to be open.
For details, see @ref isc::db::PgSqlConnection::openDatabase().
@subsection infinite-valid-lifetime Infinite Valid Lifetime
The @c isc::dhcp::Lease class uses cltt (client last transmission time)
and valid lifetime, backend lease uses expire and valid lifetime.
These quantities are bound by the equation:
@code
expire = cltt + valid_lifetime
@endcode
But when expire is a 32 bit date and valid lifetime is the infinity
special value (0xffffffff) this overflows so for MySQL and PostgreSQL
backends this becomes:
@code
expire = cltt + valid_lifetime if valid_lifetime != 0xffffffff
expire = cltt if valid_lifetime == 0xffffffff
@endcode
@section dhcpdb-host Host Backends
Host backends (known also as host data sources) are similar to lease
backends with a few differences:
- host backends are optional (so it is allowed to have none) because
the first source of host reservations is the server configuration,
others are alternate backends.
- there may be more than one host backend. In such a case for lookups
returning a collection all results are appended, for lookups returning
at most one entry the first found is returned. Add operation is submitted
to all alternate backends which can ignore it, add the entry or throw
if the new entry conflicts with an already existing one. Delete
operations are submitted in sequence to all alternate backends until
one finds the entry, deletes it and returns true.
- the first alternate backend can be a cache (host cache hook library
is a premium feature) which avoids to lookup slow databases.
For subnet ID and identifier negative caching is optionally supported.
@subsection dhcpdb-caching Caching
Some of these considerations apply to lease backends too but only
the host caching was analyzed and implemented.
Caching divides into two parts, positive and negative caching, and
its support is implemented at two places, a cache backend and inside
the host manager, i.e. the entity calling backends in sequence
providing the result of lookups to allocation engines.
The idea of positive caching is simple: when a value not in the
cache in returned by a database, this value is added to the cache
so the next time it will be available without calling and waiting
for the database.
This cannot be extended to lookups returning a collection because
they are supposed to collect and append results from all backends.
If you replace append by merge you avoid duplicate items in the
result but still get no benefit from caching. So in general a cache
backend should simply return nothing for these lookups.
Add (or any operation which can fail) has to wait that all backends
are called and possibly one fails before the new entry being cached.
Del is simpler: the cache backend processes it but always returns
false so the backend holding it if any is called.
Negative caching consists into adding fake entries indicating that
a particular host does not exists. As no host constructor allows
a host object without an identifier or with an empty identifier,
negative caching applies only to by identifier lookups. This is
no a problem because out-of-pools provides a clearer and simpler
to implement performance benefit than by address negative caching.
Note that by identifier negative caching can be critical for
performance because the non-existence is the worst case for lookups.
Negative cache entries should be easily identified (current
implementation uses the negative_ flag member in @c host class)
so all lookups returning at most one entry can (in fact have to)
return a null pointer when they get a negative cache entry.
Note this is for all such lookups, not only by identifier lookups,
to allow to negative cached entries with any value, for instance
with a IP address.
There is no direct and simple way to support negative caching
for collection lookups so again cache backends should return nothing
for these lookups which have not to filter out negative cached entries
from result.
Negative caching can be performed by the host manager: when a by
identifier lookup returns a null pointer, a fake entry with lookup
parameters and the negative cache mark is inserted into the cache.
Note this leads to negative cache entries without IP reservations,
this property should not be used because it limits negative cache
addition to only be performed by the host manager.
@section dhcpDatabaseBackendsMTConsiderations Multi-Threading Consideration for DHCP Database Backends
Lease and host database backends including the memfile for leases are Kea
thread safe (i.e. are thread safe when the multi-threading mode is true).
This extends to legal / forensic log backends but not to config
backends which is used only for configuration by the main thread with
packet processing threads stopped so has no thread safety
requirements.
There are exceptions:
- memfile constructor (including loading of leases from files) is not
thread safe.
- lfc handling in memfile is not thread safe: instead it is required
to be called from the main thread.
- wipe lease methods are either not thread safe or not implemented.
Note for statistics queries it does not make sense to call them with
running packet processing threads so they have no thread safety guarantees.
Note too that the memfile backend is not inter-process safe so must be kept
private to the Kea server using it.
*/