4:06 p.m.
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.
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 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?
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.
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?
Later, we will need translators to/from other rule engines; maybe ruleML
and JCR can help us here.
So far, I think Drools can do most of this; am I correct here? Does any
of this sound plausible?
Thanks very much for any tips, thoughts or comments.
Len
Len Carlsen
Enrolment Services - Student Systems
University of British Columbia
11:44 a.m.
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
6:43 p.m.
Hi Len.
Sounds like your requirements are pretty clear, which is great.
In terms of scaling to that level we have the BRMS - which will need some
(planned) improvements to make it possible to navigate such a huge amount of
stuff without anyone going insane. On the otherwise we have the engine
needing to cope with this onslaught of rules.
It seems there there are several applications to consume the rules, the
largest single one being based around courses (being 2000 courses with about
10 rules each, which sounds pretty sensible) - so that would probably be the
most challenging thing in terms of memory use (its having enough memory
available to build/load etc that mostly concerns me - that actual
performance once you get past that should not really be an issue).
Would like to talk about this more offline if you are willing (just cause
there are lots of Q's that we have) - but it is interesting as cases like
these don't come along all that often (and its hard to anticipate all
requirements). Would also like to (if possible) take a look at what you are
doing already (as you have the course rules working it sounds like) and
build it from there.
Please ping me if you want to set up a time to chat (on IRC, or we can just
exchange mails, or voice etc).
Michael.
On Nov 9, 2007 9:06 AM, Carlsen, Len <len.carlsen(a)ubc.ca> 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.
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 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?
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.
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?
Later, we will need translators to/from other rule engines; maybe ruleML
and JCR can help us here.
So far, I think Drools can do most of this; am I correct here? Does any of
this sound plausible?
Thanks very much for any tips, thoughts or comments.
Len
Len Carlsen
Enrolment Services - Student Systems
University of British Columbia
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
--
Michael D Neale
home: www.michaelneale.net
blog: michaelneale.blogspot.com
2:13 p.m.
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
________________________________
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Mark Proctor
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2007 9:44 AM
To: Rules Users List
Subject: Re: [rules-users] Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
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
________________________________
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
2:45 p.m.
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 :)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] *On Behalf Of *Mark Proctor
*Sent:* Saturday, November 17, 2007 9:44 AM
*To:* Rules Users List
*Subject:* Re: [rules-users] Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
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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rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org <mailto:rules-users@lists.jboss.org>
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
5:11 p.m.
We did some simple micro performance/scalability testing a while back on
Drools 4.0.1 where we came to a similar conclusion. We may even publish
our test results (and improve our tests) in the future.
Len
________________________________
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Mark Proctor
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 12:46 PM
To: Rules Users List
Subject: Re: [rules-users] Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
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 :)
________________________________
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Mark Proctor
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2007 9:44 AM
To: Rules Users List
Subject: Re: [rules-users] Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
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
________________________________
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
________________________________
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
5:23 p.m.
Carlsen, Len wrote:
We did some simple micro performance/scalability testing a while back
on Drools 4.0.1 where we came to a similar conclusion. We may even
publish our test results (and improve our tests) in the future.
sure, but if you could give us a bit to tweak trunk, so if we publish
old stats we can say, but atleast its improving. We'll be focusing on
this end of the year, beginning of the new year.
Len
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] *On Behalf Of *Mark Proctor
*Sent:* Tuesday, November 20, 2007 12:46 PM
*To:* Rules Users List
*Subject:* Re: [rules-users] Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
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 :)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
<mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org>
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] *On Behalf Of *Mark Proctor
*Sent:* Saturday, November 17, 2007 9:44 AM
*To:* Rules Users List
*Subject:* Re: [rules-users] Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
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
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org <mailto:rules-users@lists.jboss.org>
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org <mailto:rules-users@lists.jboss.org>
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
5:28 p.m.
If we do publish them then we will re-run the tests against the latest
release. Maybe we can send you the tests for validation if we decide to
publish them.
Len
________________________________
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Mark Proctor
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 3:24 PM
To: Rules Users List
Subject: Re: [rules-users] Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Carlsen, Len wrote:
We did some simple micro performance/scalability testing a while back on
Drools 4.0.1 where we came to a similar conclusion. We may even publish
our test results (and improve our tests) in the future.
sure, but if you could give us a bit to tweak trunk, so if we publish
old stats we can say, but atleast its improving. We'll be focusing on
this end of the year, beginning of the new year.
Len
________________________________
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Mark Proctor
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2007 12:46 PM
To: Rules Users List
Subject: Re: [rules-users] Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
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 :)
________________________________
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Mark Proctor
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2007 9:44 AM
To: Rules Users List
Subject: Re: [rules-users] Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
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
________________________________
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
________________________________
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
________________________________
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
7:08 a.m.
Mark Proctor wrote:
Carlsen, Len wrote:
>
>
> 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.
yes, feedback on solver is very welcome :)
The good news is, I am now working on an example called Examination,
which is an implementation for the itc2007 examination competition:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameval...
It's based on real-world data. The "starter" dataset contains 7883
students, 607 exams, 54 periods and 7 rooms. There are 5 hard
constraints and 7 soft constraints:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameval...
The bad news is, it's not performing yet, because I need to make a
scalable selector implementation, which I am working on.
There's an example called lesson schedule (which schedules courses), but
that's just a toy example to learn drools-solver, at it just has 2 hard
constraints.
One piece of advice though: separate the solver part from the rest. Once
the solver starts calculating, you 'll only want to have score-related
rules in the rulebase. The solver can easily do a million fireAllRules
per minute, so every performance loss is blown up.
With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet
1:04 p.m.
This is very cool and is exactly what we will need for our new open
source SIS. Once we have designed our BRMS then we will look more
closely at Drools Solver (especially after the ITC competition).
Currently, we are using Ad Astra for our course timetabling and exam
scheduling and it would be good if we could replace that with Solver.
Thanks for your interest,
Len
-----Original Message-----
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Geoffrey De
Smet
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 5:09 AM
To: rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
Subject: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Mark Proctor wrote:
Carlsen, Len wrote:
>
>
> 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.
yes, feedback on solver is very welcome :)
The good news is, I am now working on an example called Examination,
which is an implementation for the itc2007 examination competition:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
luation.htm
It's based on real-world data. The "starter" dataset contains 7883
students, 607 exams, 54 periods and 7 rooms. There are 5 hard
constraints and 7 soft constraints:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
luation.htm
The bad news is, it's not performing yet, because I need to make a
scalable selector implementation, which I am working on.
There's an example called lesson schedule (which schedules courses), but
that's just a toy example to learn drools-solver, at it just has 2 hard
constraints.
One piece of advice though: separate the solver part from the rest. Once
the solver starts calculating, you 'll only want to have score-related
rules in the rulebase. The solver can easily do a million fireAllRules
per minute, so every performance loss is blown up.
With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
3:02 a.m.
Carlsen, Len wrote:
This is very cool and is exactly what we will need for our new open
source SIS. Once we have designed our BRMS then we will look more
closely at Drools Solver (especially after the ITC competition).
Are you writting your own BRMS from scratch? Are there any particular
issues with the BRMS at the moment that would warrant this? Maybe you
could work on the BRMS we have now to extend it to satisfy your needs.
Currently, we are using Ad Astra for our course timetabling and exam
scheduling and it would be good if we could replace that with Solver.
Thanks for your interest,
Len
-----Original Message-----
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Geoffrey De
Smet
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 5:09 AM
To: rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
Subject: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Mark Proctor wrote:
> Carlsen, Len wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
yes, feedback on solver is very welcome :)
The good news is, I am now working on an example called Examination,
which is an implementation for the itc2007 examination competition:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
luation.htm
It's based on real-world data. The "starter" dataset contains 7883
students, 607 exams, 54 periods and 7 rooms. There are 5 hard
constraints and 7 soft constraints:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
luation.htm
The bad news is, it's not performing yet, because I need to make a
scalable selector implementation, which I am working on.
There's an example called lesson schedule (which schedules courses), but
that's just a toy example to learn drools-solver, at it just has 2 hard
constraints.
One piece of advice though: separate the solver part from the rest. Once
the solver starts calculating, you 'll only want to have score-related
rules in the rulebase. The solver can easily do a million fireAllRules
per minute, so every performance loss is blown up.
With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
1:43 p.m.
We would probably use the existing server side code and extent the
current BRMS client UI, to satisfy our needs. By designing our BRMS I
mostly meant designing the structure of all our rule domains,
rules/packages and facts (courses/learning units).
Len
________________________________
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Mark Proctor
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007 1:02 AM
To: Rules Users List
Subject: Re: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Carlsen, Len wrote:
This is very cool and is exactly what we will need for our new
open
source SIS. Once we have designed our BRMS then we will look
more
closely at Drools Solver (especially after the ITC competition).
Are you writting your own BRMS from scratch? Are there any particular
issues with the BRMS at the moment that would warrant this? Maybe you
could work on the BRMS we have now to extend it to satisfy your needs.
Currently, we are using Ad Astra for our course timetabling and
exam
scheduling and it would be good if we could replace that with
Solver.
Thanks for your interest,
Len
-----Original Message-----
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of
Geoffrey De
Smet
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 5:09 AM
To: rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
Subject: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Mark Proctor wrote:
Carlsen, Len wrote:
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.
yes, feedback on solver is very welcome :)
The good news is, I am now working on an example called
Examination,
which is an implementation for the itc2007 examination
competition:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
luation.htm
It's based on real-world data. The "starter" dataset contains
7883
students, 607 exams, 54 periods and 7 rooms. There are 5 hard
constraints and 7 soft constraints:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
luation.htm
The bad news is, it's not performing yet, because I need to make
a
scalable selector implementation, which I am working on.
There's an example called lesson schedule (which schedules
courses), but
that's just a toy example to learn drools-solver, at it just has
2 hard
constraints.
One piece of advice though: separate the solver part from the
rest. Once
the solver starts calculating, you 'll only want to have
score-related
rules in the rulebase. The solver can easily do a million
fireAllRules
per minute, so every performance loss is blown up.
With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
2:49 p.m.
Carlsen, Len wrote:
We would probably use the existing server side code and extent the
current BRMS client UI, to satisfy our needs. By designing our BRMS I
mostly meant designing the structure of all our rule domains,
rules/packages and facts (courses/learning units).
Great, one of the things we
would love to see happen is a extensible GUI
framework where people can include their own authoring environments for
their rules - bit like eclipse views and perspectives, but obviosly much
simpler and smaller.
Len
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] *On Behalf Of *Mark Proctor
*Sent:* Saturday, November 24, 2007 1:02 AM
*To:* Rules Users List
*Subject:* Re: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Carlsen, Len wrote:
> This is very cool and is exactly what we will need for our new open
> source SIS. Once we have designed our BRMS then we will look more
> closely at Drools Solver (especially after the ITC competition).
>
Are you writting your own BRMS from scratch? Are there any particular
issues with the BRMS at the moment that would warrant this? Maybe you
could work on the BRMS we have now to extend it to satisfy your needs.
> Currently, we are using Ad Astra for our course timetabling and exam
> scheduling and it would be good if we could replace that with Solver.
>
> Thanks for your interest,
>
> Len
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
> [mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Geoffrey De
> Smet
> Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 5:09 AM
> To: rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
> Subject: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
>
>
> Mark Proctor wrote:
>
>> Carlsen, Len wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>
> yes, feedback on solver is very welcome :)
>
> The good news is, I am now working on an example called Examination,
> which is an implementation for the itc2007 examination competition:
> http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
> luation.htm
> It's based on real-world data. The "starter" dataset contains 7883
> students, 607 exams, 54 periods and 7 rooms. There are 5 hard
> constraints and 7 soft constraints:
> http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
> luation.htm
>
> The bad news is, it's not performing yet, because I need to make a
> scalable selector implementation, which I am working on.
>
> There's an example called lesson schedule (which schedules courses), but
>
> that's just a toy example to learn drools-solver, at it just has 2 hard
> constraints.
>
> One piece of advice though: separate the solver part from the rest. Once
>
> the solver starts calculating, you 'll only want to have score-related
>
> rules in the rulebase. The solver can easily do a million fireAllRules
> per minute, so every performance loss is blown up.
>
> With kind regards,
> Geoffrey De Smet
>
> _______________________________________________
> rules-users mailing list
> rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
>
> _______________________________________________
> rules-users mailing list
> rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
10:24 p.m.
Hi Len.
Yes the main challenges I see are to do with the sheer numbers of rules you
see yourself happening, and how to manage that in any sort of BRMS. ie are
there 100's of packages, or a few uber packages etc. How do you break it up
so its manageable? etc... even simple things, like if there is a drop down
with rule names - that doesnt' scale to well to that number of rules (in a
single package). We have categories which allow you to break down views into
rules etc.
The other side of the coin is compile time taken and memory used. Good to
see you have done some profiling of it (I saw you PDF) - I haven't had a
chance to load up your project yet but I did do some of my own profiling.
Since 4.0.3 the impact of deserialization and rule packages has been partly
addressed.
I am worried that one rule change would require a 5 minute rebuild of an
entire package (is 5 minutes too long? I really don't know how much your
rules will change etc). On the BRMS server, we need to have some background
resource management where we control how many builds/tests are going on so
that we dont' starve the BRMS as resources (so in that sense it becomes a
bit like a CI server, where it detects changes and then builds int he
background).
Regarding your profiling so far - nothing seems that surprising - were there
any areas that you think needed particular attention?
Michael.
On Nov 25, 2007 6:43 AM, Carlsen, Len <len.carlsen(a)ubc.ca> wrote:
We would probably use the existing server side code and extent the
current BRMS client UI, to satisfy our needs. By designing our BRMS I
mostly meant designing the structure of all our rule domains, rules/packages
and facts (courses/learning units).
Len
------------------------------
*From:* rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org [mailto:
rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org] *On Behalf Of *Mark Proctor
*Sent:* Saturday, November 24, 2007 1:02 AM
*To:* Rules Users List
*Subject:* Re: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Carlsen, Len wrote:
This is very cool and is exactly what we will need for our new open
source SIS. Once we have designed our BRMS then we will look more
closely at Drools Solver (especially after the ITC competition).
Are you writting your own BRMS from scratch? Are there any particular
issues with the BRMS at the moment that would warrant this? Maybe you could
work on the BRMS we have now to extend it to satisfy your needs.
Currently, we are using Ad Astra for our course timetabling and exam
scheduling and it would be good if we could replace that with Solver.
Thanks for your interest,
Len
-----Original Message-----
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org <rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org>]
On Behalf Of Geoffrey De
Smet
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 5:09 AM
To: rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
Subject: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Mark Proctor wrote:
Carlsen, Len wrote:
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.
yes, feedback on solver is very welcome :)
The good news is, I am now working on an example called Examination,
which is an implementation for the itc2007 examination
competition:http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/examevaluation.htm
It's based on real-world data. The "starter" dataset contains 7883
students, 607 exams, 54 periods and 7 rooms. There are 5 hard
constraints and 7 soft
constraints:http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/examevaluation.htm
The bad news is, it's not performing yet, because I need to make a
scalable selector implementation, which I am working on.
There's an example called lesson schedule (which schedules courses), but
that's just a toy example to learn drools-solver, at it just has 2 hard
constraints.
One piece of advice though: separate the solver part from the rest. Once
the solver starts calculating, you 'll only want to have score-related
rules in the rulebase. The solver can easily do a million fireAllRules
per minute, so every performance loss is blown up.
With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing
listrules-users@lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing
listrules-users@lists.jboss.orghttps://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
--
Michael D Neale
home: www.michaelneale.net
blog: michaelneale.blogspot.com
1:06 p.m.
Hi Michael,
Yes, our biggest challenge is the design of our BRMS (rules, packages,
categories etc.). I don't think compilation times of several minutes is
a problem since we will probably compile new or modified
rules/packages/categories in a verification/staging environment for
testing before moving them to production. Maybe we can queue
builds/tests for resource management (since it is already running in a
verification environment) so the BRMS doesn't run out of resources. So
far, I think the performance evaluation looks pretty good with no areas
needing particular attention. We will probably know more once we have
some real use cases.
Thanks,
Len
________________________________
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Michael Neale
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2007 8:24 PM
To: Rules Users List
Subject: Re: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Hi Len.
Yes the main challenges I see are to do with the sheer numbers of rules
you see yourself happening, and how to manage that in any sort of BRMS.
ie are there 100's of packages, or a few uber packages etc. How do you
break it up so its manageable? etc... even simple things, like if there
is a drop down with rule names - that doesnt' scale to well to that
number of rules (in a single package). We have categories which allow
you to break down views into rules etc.
The other side of the coin is compile time taken and memory used. Good
to see you have done some profiling of it (I saw you PDF) - I haven't
had a chance to load up your project yet but I did do some of my own
profiling. Since 4.0.3 the impact of deserialization and rule packages
has been partly addressed.
I am worried that one rule change would require a 5 minute rebuild of an
entire package (is 5 minutes too long? I really don't know how much your
rules will change etc). On the BRMS server, we need to have some
background resource management where we control how many builds/tests
are going on so that we dont' starve the BRMS as resources (so in that
sense it becomes a bit like a CI server, where it detects changes and
then builds int he background).
Regarding your profiling so far - nothing seems that surprising - were
there any areas that you think needed particular attention?
Michael.
On Nov 25, 2007 6:43 AM, Carlsen, Len < len.carlsen(a)ubc.ca> wrote:
We would probably use the existing server side code and extent the
current BRMS client UI, to satisfy our needs. By designing our BRMS I
mostly meant designing the structure of all our rule domains,
rules/packages and facts (courses/learning units).
Len
________________________________
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Mark Proctor
Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007 1:02 AM
To: Rules Users List
Subject: Re: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Carlsen, Len wrote:
This is very cool and is exactly what we will need for our new open
source SIS. Once we have designed our BRMS then we will look more
closely at Drools Solver (especially after the ITC competition).
Are you writting your own BRMS from scratch? Are there any particular
issues with the BRMS at the moment that would warrant this? Maybe you
could work on the BRMS we have now to extend it to satisfy your needs.
Currently, we are using Ad Astra for our course timetabling and exam
scheduling and it would be good if we could replace that with Solver.
Thanks for your interest,
Len
-----Original Message-----
From: rules-users-bounces(a)lists.jboss.org
[mailto:rules-users-bounces@lists.jboss.org] On Behalf Of Geoffrey De
Smet
Sent: Friday, November 23, 2007 5:09 AM
To: rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
Subject: [rules-users] Re: Drools and BRMS (60,000+ rules)
Mark Proctor wrote:
Carlsen, Len wrote:
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.
yes, feedback on solver is very welcome :)
The good news is, I am now working on an example called Examination,
which is an implementation for the itc2007 examination competition:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
luation.htm
It's based on real-world data. The "starter" dataset contains 7883
students, 607 exams, 54 periods and 7 rooms. There are 5 hard
constraints and 7 soft constraints:
http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/examtrack/exam_track_index_files/exameva
luation.htm
The bad news is, it's not performing yet, because I need to make a
scalable selector implementation, which I am working on.
There's an example called lesson schedule (which schedules courses), but
that's just a toy example to learn drools-solver, at it just has 2 hard
constraints.
One piece of advice though: separate the solver part from the rest. Once
the solver starts calculating, you 'll only want to have score-related
rules in the rulebase. The solver can easily do a million fireAllRules
per minute, so every performance loss is blown up.
With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
_______________________________________________
rules-users mailing list
rules-users(a)lists.jboss.org
https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/rules-users
--
Michael D Neale
home: www.michaelneale.net
blog: michaelneale.blogspot.com
5782
days inactive
5807
days old
14 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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Carlsen, Len -
Geoffrey De Smet -
Mark Proctor -
Michael Neale