summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/src/lib/dhcpsrv/database_backends.dox
blob: fc14e1d56233c91ccaa2c1795e70d088a13d0ef4 (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
// 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:

  - <b>type</b> - specifies the type of database backend.  The following values
  for the type keyword are supported:
     - <B>memfile</b> - In-memory database.
     - <b>mysql</b> - Use MySQL as the database. Must be enabled at compilation
       time.
     - <b>postgresql</b> - 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

  - <b>host</b> - host on which the selected database is running.  If not
  supplied, "localhost" is assumed.
  - <b>name</b> - name of the MySQL database to access.  There is no default -
  this must always be supplied.
  - <b>password</b> - password for the selected user ID (see below).  If not
  specified, no password is used.
  - <b>user</b> - 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

  - <b>host</b> - host on which the selected database is running.  If not
  supplied, "localhost" is assumed.
  - <b>name</b> - name of the PostgreSQL database to access.  There is no
  default - this must always be supplied.
  - <b>password</b> - password for the selected user ID (see below).  If not
  specified, no password is used.
  - <b>user</b> - 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.

  */