Rule Management in Active Database Systems

Generally, there is a large number of rules and data in information systems, and both change frequently in response to business changes. In this context, Active Database Systems (ADBSs) represent a powerful mean to implement an appropriate environment to manage rules and data in a uniform approach, but unfortunately they do not have efficient rule management mechanisms. ADBSs provide a good infrastructure to define and execute rules, but they do not satisfy completely the necessities of rules management that demand current business applications. This paper discusses the main problems of rule management in ADBSs and analyzes the current solutions presented in literature. After that, we propose a rule meta-model for ADBSs, which goal is to represent graphically the anatomy of rules, their properties and the different kind of relationships. This meta-model is the base to extend the current rule models of ADBSs in order to add efficient rule management mechanisms.