Active Database Systems

Integrating a production rules facility into a database system provides a uniform mechanism for a number of advanced database features including integrity constraint enforcement, derived data maintenance, triggers, alerters, protection, version control, and others. In addition, a database system with rule processing capabilities provides a useful platform for large and efficient knowledge-base and expert systems. Database systems with production rules are referred to as active database systems, and the field of active database systems has indeed been active. This chapter summarizes current work in active database systems; topics covered include active database rule models and languages, rule execution semantics, and implementation issues. 1 Introduction Conventional database systems are passive: they only execute queries or transactions explicitly submitted by a user or an application program. For many applications, however, it is important to monitor situations of interest, and to ..