[rules-users] Storing/Loading Rules In/From a Database

Greetings, everyone! I would like to get some advice/guide from you on storing/loading rules in/from a database. Here is my use case, in my domain object model, there is a class named Promotion, and for each instance of Promotion (there could be thousands promotions), I need to configure one or more rules for the promotion, so there is a one-to-many relation between the promotion and its rules. I plan to store the rules in the same DB as Promotion and also maintain the one-to-many relation between them. At runtime, when facts are inserted, all promotions' rules need to be evaluated, and I'd like the firing rules to know their "owning" promotion instances and take some action on those instances. And here are my questions/confusions: 1. Do I need to create my own tables for storing rules/conditions/actions OR can I use the Drools Repository? (Remember I have to keep the relation between a promotion and its rules) 2. If I need to create my own tables, how should I load the rules at runtime? The only way I can think of right now is something like string concatenation and end up with the DRL source format and then use the PackageBuilder. Would this work? Is there any better ways? 3. At runtime, I need to evaluate ALL the rules to find which promotion(s) will match, so do I just create a single RuleBase, add all the packages (there could be tens of thousands of rules), then create the session and insert the fact and then fire them? Will this cause any performance issue? What is the best practices to deal with large number of rules? Thanks in advance. Tong