"Building a Rule Engine with SQL Server"

SQL Server Developer Center: Building a Rule Engine with SQL Server

"Summary: Rules play a central role in a wide variety of applications. In addition to the declarative specification of business rules, the simple rule engine design described in this article can be used to implement state machines, predicate dispatchers, or any other rule-based system. (15 printed pages)

Introduction

The term rule is often used to describe what may more accurately be called a well-formed formula (wff). In many applications, the satisfaction of a wff is necessary to identify the suitability of some action. For example, in a customer relationship management (CRM) application, we may want to suggest one or more products similar to the product currently being purchased. To make our suggestion as attractive as possible, it would be wise to leverage the information we have gathered about this, and other, customers. For instance, our decision about which additional products to offer might be based on the current customer's age, purchase history, gender, geographic location, or a wide array of other factors. By including such demographics, we can maximize the likelihood that our suggestions will be valuable to our customers, and will consequently translate into additional purchases and revenue for our firm.

In this article we present a design for a rule engine based on nothing more than a few tables and queries in a SQL Server database. ..."

I'm also always up for a new/different Rules engine.

The thing I have to remember is that "Rules Engine != Workflow" ... I find myself trying to mix the two sometime. Now that Windows Workflow is kind of close it's easier for me to keep the two mentally separate. The right tool for the right job, etc, etc.