Len
Carlsen, Len
wrote:
Thanks
a lot for your comments, Mark. Since our new Student Information System
will be
open source we would be more than happy to make contributions back into
the
community.
Since our SIS will be based on
SOA principles, we are
thinking of Making Drools a decision service (web service) for a single
entry
point since we don’t want to have thousands of rule services.
Thanks,
Len
Mic's
been doing some
scalability profiling for you. Engine execution can scale to 60K
rules,
however the compilation and build process is quite slow at that
large numbers. The good news is we have never profiled and optimised
our compilation
and build processes, we haven't had the use cases yet to warrant this -
so we
can definitely make some improvements here, when we get time :)
Carlsen, Len
wrote:
Hello,
I am wondering if anyone has any
experience in managing very
large rule sets and facts and could share their experiences in the
design and
management of this.
We are embarking on a new
Student Information System project
here at UBC in conjunction with several other American universities.
We
have pretty much decided to use Drools as our rules engine and maybe
also the
Drools BRMS for our business rules management. Our first application
is
the course curriculum application/module where we will manage course
co-requisites, pre-requisites, etc. and we estimate that we will have
about
20,000 course rules. We currently have about 15,000 course rules
(QuickRules)
in production now. We will also have security rules, input/form
validation
rules, student awards rules, degree rules, enrolment rules, admission
rules,
student financial rules etc. which will total about 40,000 rules. So
currently
we are looking at managing about 60,000 rules (not including
versioning).
If we include versioning then there would probably be more than 100,000
rules.
We
are using jackrabbit
JCR, I think it can handle this, but I don't have any hard figures for
the
scalability. If it works for you, please do let us know :)
Example:
A single course could have 10 or
more rules per course
version. We currently have about 2000 course and most courses have more
than 1
version.
We are looking into developing
our own rules management
system to define dependencies between rules, courses (facts) and course
+ rule
versions. E.g. Course CHEM101 version 1 links to CHEM101 a single rule
or a
rule set/package version 1 by a rule id.
We need the ability to notify
users when rules are modified
which impacts other rules and what impact changing a rule can cause for
example
a degree program. E.g. changing a course‘s pre-requisite may affect
other
courses’ pre-requisites; rules about rules. We also need the ability to
find out why a student was not able to register for a course etc. We
will also
need to show the course dependency graph visually (the RDBMS can
probably help
us here). Later, we are hoping to use the Drools Solver for course and
exam
scheduling and also to use it for student degree planning and student
awards.
We
don't currently have
an exposed event model in the BRMS or change notification. However this
would
not be hard to add, maybe you could help us? We have drools-analytics
which
will create an api with the change impact requirements you need, it is
not yet
currently integrated into the BRMS, bit if you do the notificatino part
it
should be easy enough to add.
We will need to translate the
rules into English language
syntax for publication in the course calendar and later into other
languages
(first French) since the SIS application will be used internationally.
Listing requirements
could just be shown in bulleted form. Probably can’t use the DSL in
this
case since we would need to support several languages or maybe I am
wrong here?
DSL
are just a
templating language, if can be made to look english like - if that's
what you
need. You also have the "docementation" field in the BRMS, which you
can use. If you have other ideas please spec them out in a JIRA and
we'll look
inoto doing them in the future, or maybe you can help us :)
If we use the Drools BRMS to
store all of our rules on a
relational database, will we be able to write SQL queries to get at
specific
rules/packages to link facts (courses) to rules? Or do we have to go
through
the BRMS to get at the rules. Does BRMS have a facility to validate
rules
against facts so you can see if your rules execute correctly against
your
data/facts before committing your rules. Or maybe we need a testing
framework
for this.
We
use JackRabbit JCR,
we provide high level apis to accessing data, but you an ofcourse ue
the
jackrabbit low level apsi - if you really know what you are doing. We
have the
ability to validate the compilation of the rules, scenario testing is
currently
being added and will be in the next release.
Other issues are the performance
of the Drools Solver and having
thousands of rules compiled, loaded and running. During registration we
could
have thousands of rules executing concurrently. The rules engine and
the BRMS
would be services as part of an SOA infrastructure (and an OSGi service
environment). Anyone got any experience with Drools in an OSGi
environment with respect to class loading issues when compiling rules
and facts
from other bundles since rules and facts may be in different bundles?
Bundle
buddy class loading?
No
but it is something
that interests us, please give us your OSGi feedback. Solver is not
currently a
supported product, its very much R&D alphaware, but I'm sure
geoffrey would
love your feedback, good to see people are evaluating it.
Later, we will need translators
to/from other rule engines;
maybe ruleML and JCR can help us here.
JCR
is jus a storage
repository, for rule translators you are on your own. However Drools
itself is
language independant, we are exposing the api for pluggeable parsers -
so in
theory you could write parsers for each of these.
So far, I think Drools can do
most of this; am I correct
here? Does any of this sound plausible?
I'm
sure you can get by
for now, and work with us to make it the best system for your needs.
Thanks very much for any tips,
thoughts or comments.
Len
Len Carlsen
Enrolment Services - Student
Systems
University
of British
Columbia
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