Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

"Paul Vernon" <paul.vernon_at_ukk.ibmm.comm> wrote in message news:bn31fe$aie$1_at_gazette.almaden.ibm.com...
> "Lauri Pietarinen" <lauri.pietarinen_at_atbusiness.com> wrote in message
> news:bmv01r$u69$1_at_nyytiset.pp.htv.fi...
> > >>Say if you had a large insurance company with, say, 10000 rules, would
> > >>it *really* work?
> > >>
>
> Il'd say that would be exactly the kind of application that a pure
> relational approach would *really* work very well indeed.
>
> > >
> > >Yes, absolutely. It would scale at least as well as it does today. It
> would
> > >be more manageable than it is today because the important business
logic
> > >would not be scattered among hundreds of applications. It would easily
> adapt
> > >to all situations. Why would it not?
> > >
> > >
> > [snipped]
> >
> > That is all very clear, and that is how I have understood the goal.
> > But, as they say, the devil lies in the details.
> >
> > The Versata product has been used to create a fairly large rule-based
> > application at
> > American Management Systems. I wonder if anybody knows anything about
> > this application
> > .
> > See this IBM red book:
> >
>
http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg246510.html? Open
>
> Can't say I know about that app, but it's statistic of replacing 3.7
million
> lines of (COBOL) code with 12,000 business rules is not a bad start to
what
> I suspect is possible with relational approaches (i.e. I think I'd be
> surprised if those 12,000 couldn't be reduced by a factor of 10 in a purer
> relational system).

The question is not how few rules one can write, but how few rules the dbms must enforce to ensure consistency. If they wrote 12,000 but the dbms need only enforce 1,200, the dbms takes care of the reduction. Received on Tue Oct 21 2003 - 15:58:58 CEST