Re: Dreaming About Redesigning SQL

"Lauri Pietarinen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >>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). I note also that they say they got 85-90 percent of the
business logic coded as rules. Again, could be better but not a bad start.
We would need to kill the idea of 'batch processing' to get closer to 100% I
suggest (and getting rid of transactions would help also ;-). Their 98-99%
of the GUI being rule driven is good however.

Regards
Paul Vernon
Business Intelligence, IBM Global Services