How to Build a Business Rules Engine

Reference tables very rarely have a column to define the meaning of the code and

description. Most IT staff rely on the contents of the description column for this

purpose. Yet this is often inadequate. For instance, a Country table may have a record

with a code of “CPR” and a description of “China.” However, the organization that

has created this record may want “China” to exclude Hong Kong and Taiwan, but to

include Macao and Tibet. This definition, or explanation, must be captured, and the

best way to do it is to have an additional column for a definition in every reference

table. The column must be of unlimited length, that is, a memo-type datatype. This

is another standard adopted here.

Extending the Table Entity

Now that standards for reference data ...