Efficiently run a PQL query on a long list of nodes in Puppet Enterprise

You might need to include or exclude a large number of nodes in a Puppet Query Language (PQL) query due to multiple OS with different version numbers. If so, choosing the right query operator can reduce query execution time and improve performance.

Version and installation information

PE version: All supported

Solution

Use the IN operator instead of the OR operator when you have a large number of nodes to include or exclude. When running a PQL query on a smaller number of nodes, it doesn’t take as much time to process the query, so the operator that you choose doesn’t affect query time as much.

Here’s an example of how to improve a query by changing OR to IN:

This example using OR is not efficient:

puppet query 'inventory[certname] {
    ! (
        certname = "puppet00.puppet.com" or
        certname = "puppet01.puppet.com" or
        certname = "puppet02.puppet.com" or
        certname = "puppet03.puppet.com" or
        certname = "puppet04.puppet.com" or
        certname = "puppet05.puppet.com" or
        certname = "puppet06.puppet.com" or
        certname = "puppet07.puppet.com" or
        certname = "puppet08.puppet.com" or
    )}’

Here’s a more efficient version of the query using IN:

puppet query 'inventory[certname] {
    ! (
        certname in [
            "puppet00.puppet.com",
            "puppet01.puppet.com",
            "puppet02.puppet.com",
            "puppet03.puppet.com",
            "puppet04.puppet.com",
            "puppet05.puppet.com",
            "puppet06.puppet.com",
            "puppet07.puppet.com",
            "puppet08.puppet.com",
        ]
    )}’

Learn more about PQL by reading Learn to use Puppet Query Language (PQL).