What Not How: The Business Rules Approach to Application Development [Paperback]

C. J. Date (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201708507 | ISBN-13: 978-0201708509 | Publication Date: April 22, 2000 | Edition: 1

Business rules are transforming the design of enterprise database systems, enabling companies to achieve dramatic benefits in speed, flexibility, productivity, and platform-independence. In What Not How, C. J. Date -- one of the world's leading database experts -- offers the first concise, non-technical introduction to business rules. Date explains how business rules allow applications to be developed declaratively -- by simply stating what needs to be done, rather than exactly how to do it. He introduces presentation, database and application rules; shows how to build data models that incorporate business rules; and offers practical guidance on minimizing the risks associated with the business rules approach. Then, in Part II, Date demonstrates how business rules build on classic relational technology, addressing key technical issues such as views, base tables, stored tables, relationships, and integrity constraints. What Not How is written for managers, database professionals, Web/e-commerce specialists -- and anyone who needs a faster, better way to deliver high-quality enterprise IT systems.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

An exciting new technology called business rules is beginning to have a major positive impact on the IT industry--more precisely, on the way we develop and maintain computer applications. The aim of this book is to explain what this new technology is all about, and why you should care. I must make it very clear right away that the book is not impartial. I'm very enthusiastic about business rules!--and I hope you will be too, when you've finished reading. In other words, this is definitely a book with an attitude: It explicitly champions the business rules idea, and it describes and explains what in my opinion are the merits and benefits of that idea. Why am I so enthusiastic? For two reasons: because of what the technology can do, and because it is so squarely in the spirit of "the original relational vision." And the book's structure reflects these two points. To be more specific, Part I is an overview of what business rule technology consists of and what it makes possible, and Part II then takes another look at the ideas presented in Part I and considers them from an explicitly relational point of view.

I should also make it clear that the book grew out of the script for a live presentation. As a consequence, the style is a good deal chattier than my usual writing, and the tone is possibly a little shrill on occasion . . . In the interests of full disclosure, I must also explain that the presentation and the book were both produced under an agreement with Versata Inc. (formerly known as Vision Software Tools Inc.), a company that has a business rules product to sell. However, the book is not about Versata specifically, nor is it about any other specific company or product; rather, it's about business rule technology in general. What's more, "the views expressed are my own"; they're not necessarily endorsed by Versata, nor by any other vendor. Equally, I don't mean to suggest that all of the features we're going to be examining can be found in all of the commercially available products (or in some cases, perhaps, in any of them!). The book describes how business rule systems work in general and in principle; it doesn't necessarily correspond exactly to the way any given product works in practice. Who should read this book: Part I of the book is meant to introduce business rule technology to the widest possible audience. It's deliberately not very technical; in fact, it's intended primarily as a "manager's guide" to the subject, though I do believe that technologists, especially people concerned with developing databases and applications in the traditional way, should benefit from it as well. All you need in order to understand Part I is a basic knowledge of what databases and applications are all about, together with a broad idea of what's involved in the traditional approach to developing such databases and applications. Part II of the book is a little more technical in nature, but not very much so; the primary target audience is still basically as for Part I, and in any case most of the technical background required to understand the overall message is explained in the text itself. How to read the book: Part I is meant to be read in sequence as written and in its entirety; skipping chapters or reading them in a different order is not recommended, at least not on a first reading. Part II can be skipped if you like, but if you do read it then I would strongly suggest, again, that you read it in sequence and in its entirety, at least on a first reading. Of course, the book is quite short, and you could probably read the whole thing in a single sitting if you felt like it. C. J. Date
Healdsburg, California
2000

0201708507P04062001

From the Back Cover

"What I think Date has done is nothing less than to lay out the foundational concepts for the next generation of business logic servers based on predicate logic. Such a breakthrough should revolutionize application development in our industry--and take business rules to their fullest expression."
--Ronald G. Ross, Principal, Business Rule Solutions, LLC
Executive Editor, DataToKnowledge Newsletter

The way we build computer applications is about to change dramatically, thanks to a new development technology known as business rules. The key idea behind the technology is that we can build applications declaratively instead of procedurally--that is, we can simply state WHAT needs to be done instead of HOW to do what needs to be done. The advantages are obvious: ease and rapidity of initial development and subsequent maintenance, hardware and software platform independence, overall productivity, business adaptivity, and more.

What Not How: The Business Rules Approach to Application Development is a concise and accessible introduction to this new technology. It is written for both managers and technical professionals. The book consists of two parts: Part I presents a broad overview of what business rules are all about; Part II then revisits the ideas in Part I and shows how they fit squarely into the solid tradition of relational technology. Topics covered include:

• Presentation rules
• Database and application rules
• Building on the data model
• Potential advantages and disadvantages
• A new look at relational fundamentals
• Business rules and the relational model

Overall, the book provides a good grounding in an important new technology, one poised to transform the way we do business in the IT world.

0201708507B04062001

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Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (April 22, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201708507
• ISBN-13: 978-0201708509
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,116,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not revolutionary, not new, not a book---but praised as such, May 15, 2000

By 

Hans Argenton - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Not How: The Business Rules Approach to Application Development (Paperback)

Chris Date wrote this book to explain "what this new technology called business rules is all about". In fact, this book is not a book---it is the augmented script of a live presentation printed in big letters---, and the technology is not new: It is declarative programming for data repositories. Nevertheless, Date aims at the widest possible audience, and so this manager's guide (as he calls it) would be a good thing were it not so absolutely black-and-white painted: Procedural code is bad, declarative code is good---being true, this is not new and not without its own problems.

Rules are certainly a very good idea for data-centered business applications with the traditional short transactions and hence short and isolated operations on that data; however, with an increasing number of rules, their semantics as a whole becomes more and more difficult, and for recursive rules with negation, you have to choose the one you like from several possibilities. So, even declarative semantics can be very hard to understand. There is a saying from the field of knowledge-engineering: "Rules are the assembly language of AI".

And that's exactly why I am so critical of that book (and give it two stars only): It makes the impression that 2 to 4 simple If-then rules are enough to capture the semantics of complex business applications. Furthermore, Date states that he is actually talking about system development! Remember the Prolog logic programing language? Not quite declarative and yet good mainly for rapid prototyping.

I admire Date's Relational Database Writings and his Introduction to Database Systems very much---each earns 5 stars in my opinion---; so I am the more disappointed that he published such a booklet, which is much too simplistic in its reasoning. We had declarative programming and deductive databases 10 years ago; unfortunately, they did not prevail. Maybe, this is Chris Date's way to give these ideas a new chance.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Yes, I agree. Now what?, April 4, 2001

By 

Robert Barnes - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Not How: The Business Rules Approach to Application Development (Paperback)

In this short (about 120 pages) book, Date makes a persuasive case that the future of programming is in rule-based programming. If, instead of writing procedural code, we simply described the business rules of our data model and the development system then determined when to apply the rules, and how to do so efficiently, we could achieve an order-of-magnitude increase in development productivity.

I enjoyed reading this book (it didn't take long), but I found myself thinking "Yes, I agree totally, now what?" I am not sure who the book is aimed at. Is it aimed at software vendors such as IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft, to suggest the kind of tools that they should be offering the rest of us, or is it aimed at people like me, involved in developing systems within a typical commercial environment? If the latter, then beyond emphasizing that we should strive to put as much as possible in our data model (for example, creating a view instead of accessing a base table filtered by a WHERE clause), it's not clear what we should do to follow Date's advice. How should my development practices change as a result of reading this book? I don't know.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Inadequate new value for the reader., November 28, 2001

By 

Larry R (San Diego, US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Not How: The Business Rules Approach to Application Development (Paperback)

To me the content of this book is not more than I would expect in a magazine article or something from an op-ed page. As with anything from Chris Date, it seems to mostly be pointing out how miserably the "relational" database vendors have implemented the One True relational model introduced by Codd and championed by Date. Beyond that, it makes the point that "business rules", the semantic layer typically bolted ad hoc onto a "relational" database with triggers and "application" layers, are better enforced as some sort of constraints expressed as part of a more formal "data model" of the database.

Beyond that the book does not seem to say much, and I do not see that it offers the reader anything more than opinions. I personally agree that "relational" databases like Oracle, DB2, SQLServer, PostgreSQL, etc., do not really provide a "relational" database in the sense that Chris Date thinks of "relational", and I agree that it would be better to shift some "business rule" enforcement towards the database. But I do not think these things are likely to happen as described in this book anytime soon, and in any case I do not think this book offers anything to current or future users of any databases which is not offered much better by other books.