AFAIK, there never was any logic for restricting updates of the Rete
structures according to individual field-oriented change notifications.
As far I remember, JRules does.
And it could be great to add/restore this possibility in drools (is
there a JIRA somewhere where we can vote?).
For Marc's question, I think there could be a confusion between a
production/inference system like drools, and something that looks like a
database trigger. And yes, if you really want to detect fields changes
individually, fields must be inserted as individual objects in the WM.