"Programmers can't get IPv6 thus that is why they do not have IPv6 in their applications"....

Fri Nov 30 20:46:45 UTC 2012

On Nov 30, 2012, at 11:09 AM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 30, 2012 at 9:45 AM, Ray Soucy <rps at maine.edu> wrote:
>> I'll see your disagree and raise you another ;-)
>> 
>> I would say you almost never want to store addresses as character data
>> unless the only thing you're using them for is logging (even then it's
>> questionable).  I run into people who do this all the time and it's a
>> nightmare.
>> 
>> It's easy to store a v6 address as a string, but when you want to select a
>> range of IPv6 addresses from a database, not having them represented as
>> integers means you can't do efficient numerical comparisons in your SQL
>> statements, it also makes indexing your table slower; to put it simply, it
>> doesn't scale well.
> 
> Hi Ray,
> 
> If you've stored them in the string format I suggested, the string
> comparison *is* an efficient numerical comparison. On a CISC processor
> it may even be implemented with a single instruction byte string
> comparison. Go test. You may be surprised at the results.
> 
> The one useful function you can't do directly from a string format is
> apply an AND mask (netmask). More often than not this is irrelevant:
> you don't want to load the data and then apply the mask, you want the
> mask to constrain the data which you load from the database. You'd
> need the database software to understand the address type and index it
> with a radix tree, something it can do with neither a string format
> nor your split 64-bit format.
> 

Since non-contiguous masking is rare, this can, actually be pretty efficient
for contiguous masking because you have a ¼ chance that the mask aligns
with a character (the more I think about this, the more I think storing
the address as a 32-character string without colons makes the most sense).
If it's not aligned on a nibble boundary, then you can either do ranged
comparisons as suggested below, or, you can do a two-step process like
this:

Let's say we want to look for addresses within 2001:db8::/29. This
would mean we need to match all strings starting with 2001:0db8
through 2001:0dbf. We could easily grab everything that begins
with '20010db%' and then select the masked values matching from the
8th column where (atoi(concat("0x",substr(addr,8,1))) & 0x8).

Forgive me if I don't get the SQL syntax exactly right or have a wrong
function name… I do more C than SQL.

Both of these comparisons could be performed in a single select
like:

SELECT * FROM <table> WHERE ip6addr is like '20010db%' and \
  (atoi(concat('0x', substr(ip6addr,8,1))) & 0x8)

This should be relatively efficient because the more expensive
second test will only be performed on records that first pass
the relatively cheap match of the first 7 characters.

Owen
> 