IEEE Spectrum just published the article “The Rise of SQL” about the recent SQL’s comeback caused not only by the ever-increasing use of databases, but also by the use of SQL within the fields of data science, machine learning, big data, and streaming systems. While traditionally, Business Rule Engines did not communicate with databases directly, our customers frequently prefer to use SQL-like business rules to access their data when it is necessary following their business logic. At the same time, they want to preserve the power of SQL dealing with databases of any complexity. Two years ago OpenRules introduced a special product “Rule DB” that does exactly this by empowering Excel-based business rules with a run-time RDBMS communication mechanism. In this post we will explain how to migrate an SQL query to OpenRules.

Traditionally, Business Rule Engines do not communicate with databases directly and expect to receive input and provide output via intermediate objects defined in Java, JSON, or XML. However, our customers frequently prefer to use business-friendly rules defined in Excel instead of separately defined SQL statements. Our new product “Rule DB” does exactly this. In this post I will describe how it works using the MySQL Sample Database. Continue reading →