WED-SQL: A Relational Framework for Design and Implementation of Process-Aware Information Systems

Despite the significant evolution of the design and implementation of business process models, a transactional approach that evolves an incremental and adaptive strategy remains an important challenge to be overcome. Traditional frameworks such as BPEL, Process Algebra, and Petri Net require an additional software layer or some third party toolkits to be able to enforce a data-state based transaction control and deal with semantic exceptions. However, the complexity of implementation based on these traditional frameworks, especially to treat exceptions, is too high. In this paper, we present the WED-SQL, a distributed framework that provides a reliable and efficient way to design and implement business processes. Our main contribution is the integration of WED-flow concepts into the PostgresSQL RDBMS. This integration enables the WED-SQL to take full advantage of transactional properties and also benefit from the SQL language to specify the WED-flow definitions.