Re: Rules Engine

Hello Malte,

The relational engine itself is a pretty okay inference engine. As I quarter-remember from an old textbook I once had (Jeffrey Ullman, _Principles of Database and Knowledge-Base Systems_) there is a "language" Datalog that supports logic programming but is based on relational operations among tuples. The theoretical limitation is that the theory requires support for unlimited recursion but real-world DBMSs limit recursion. But in real-world simple rule-based stuff one usually doesn't need recursion beyond that provided by real-world DBMSs.

I saw some recent references on the web to datalog, associated with RuleML, an XML-based inference engine standard. So look around.

I once did a chart-of-accounts rule-based data classifier in which the rules were stored in tables and then joined with the data to tag the data with classifiers. A preprocessor took the rules as entered by humans and transformed them into rules stored in tables. Obviously this wasn't a control-flow thing like you seem to be talking about, but maybe the overall idea will work.

Clark

> I am looking for a rules engine, based on Oracle, that is as generic
> as possible. I don't even know if such a beast exists.
>
> The application area is saturated by nested ifs, else and lookup in
> various tables. I want to try and consolidate all of that and hope
> that there is a more manageable way than 'just' restructuring a bunch
> of PL/SQL.
>
Received on Sat Apr 02 2005 - 21:57:31 CST