How to Build a Business Rules Engine

users will be confined to defining rules for database columns implemented prior to

the application going into production—an unacceptable limitation for a business

rules approach. These challenges will be examined in the remainder of this chapter.

Limits of Database Extension

It is important to place boundaries on how a database can be extended when build-

ing a business rules engine. The approach followed in this book is that it makes sense

to build a business rules engine to extend and add flexibility to the core capabilities

of a system. Given this, one of the requirements for the business rules engine is a

good logical data model that is directly implemented as a physical database. Users

should be permitted to construct business rules within the context ...