What Not How: The Business Rules Approach to Application Development
Author: C. J. Date
List Price: $34.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201708507
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (12 April, 2000)
Sales Rank: 98,174
Average Customer Rating: 2.9 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 2 out of 5
It's all in the tail, but it is enough for such a tiny tale?
In this book C.J. Date - renowned for his writings on relational database theory - dives into rules based approaches for application development (Part 1 in the book) and database design (Part 2 in the book). He clearly states that the book is strongly influenced by his enthusiasme for business rules, which becomes clear in Part 1, where Date is spinning his wheels. Part 2 is where the rubber hits the road.Part 1 turns out to be a discussion on how business rules and declarative statements - presentation rules, application rules and database rules - can drive the automated development of applications. The claims made have some foundation in that rules based expert systems have been around for a long time and use declarative statements as their main driving force. However, a system that will automate the creation a platform independent, complex application with a consistent, efficient and effective user interface from declarative statements alone, is something that is too far from current day reality to peak interest. Next to that, Date keeps this section fairly abstract and leaves too many gaps open to satisfy questions generated by his - now and then - bold statements. In time Part 1 will probably turn out to be visionary. Regardless, the section in it's current presentation doesn't warrant the subtitle of the book: "The Business Rules Approach to Application Development".
Now, Part 2 however, is where things start to get interesting. The first few chapters are partial relational theory refreshers. It's what follows in Chapter 12 through Chapter 14 (of the 15 in total) where the pages show tire marks. Here Date makes the mindshift from logical database design as most people know it - ERD, NF and FD - to the core of the logical database being nothing more, or less, than the formalized representation of the business *rules*. He provides solid reasoning that this fact is true in a much more literal fashion than one might expect. The stepchildren of the RDBMS's - the integrity constraints and predicates, the business rules if you will - are what databases are all about.
In all, 22 pages out of the 129 that hit the spot. If you appreciate sales-pitch like visionary texts or are a relational theory die-hard, you'll probably consider it a sweet enough lemon to buy it at it's current price of USD 25. Otherwise, give this one a miss.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Interesting ideas, but things aren't as bad as described
First off, it is difficult to give a fair review to a book with a copywrite date of 2000 that I am just now reading. The concepts are interesting and reasonable, but I don't think the state of things is as bad as the author suggests. Section II wraps up by stating that business rules *should* be able to be expressed in constraints, but the SQL vendors have let us down in this area. I find that most of the constraints that the author describes are supported by Oracle 8i which is not a new release of the product. Much is made of automating business rules using Rule Engines, but it seems that these can be handled in the DBMS. The advice on data modeling in the last chapter is good, and I think you can come away with a different way of looking at things. After reading the book, though, I am not overwhelmed with the urgent need to have my team invest in a Business Rules Engine.
Rating: 3 out of 5
A reasonable introduction with pitiful worked examples
At first I was pleased with this Book, but as I progressed through the Chapters I got progressively more disappointed. In conclusion, I think the comments on the back page say it all "provides a good grounding" - I'd rate it 'average to good' - but certainly not 'excellent'.
What lets it down are the pitiful worked examples. They are key to explaining the concepts, but the choices are terrible. They focus on Inventory Control, but I wonder if the author has ever done any real analysis in this arena?
In Chapter 4 a few examples are introduced, that reappear throughout the book, for example :
(a) "Suppliers S1 and S4 are always in the same City" - and this is reaffirmed as 'being not all unrealistic'
(b) "Suppliers in Athens can move only to London or Paris"
(c) "Average shipment quantities never decrease"
but in my 25 years experience in systems design I could never imagine these rules as being acceptable in their own right, never mind as 'classics' to be used in training/education?
When one finds poor examples like this, it always make me wonder whether there's other topics in the book that in my naivety I am accepting hook, line & sinker, and others readers more familiar than me would similarly find to be in error? I suppose I'll never know. So I still need to read further about the topic in case I've been misinformed; so if you're going to buy one book about business rules - then this isn't the one. Similar Products
Principles of the Business Rule Approach
How to Build a Business Rules Engine : Extending Application Functionality through Metadata Engineering
Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach
Book Index