Corticon provides two mechanisms that let you interface your rules with commercial databases:
Enterprise Data Connector (EDC) — This technique provides access to a single database from a project Vocabulary. You map your Vocabulary to the database and rely on Corticon to retrieve data when needed. EDC makes data access very simple and is a great option when small amounts of data are needed or performance is not paramount. EDC is tightly integrated with rule models, so the functions described in this chapter are how you effectively create queries to the database.
Advanced Data Connectors (ADC) — This technique provides control over the SQL queries used to retrieve or update data in a database. Using ADC requires more database knowledge but provides benefits such as optimized query performance when retrieving large amounts of data, and the ability to map a vocabulary to multiple data sources. ADC is recommended when performing batch rule processing.
CorticonEDC lets you define mappings to a database so that rules can access (query) a database directly, and then retrieve what it needs during execution, thus enriching the information available to the rules, and then writing data to the database when appropriate.
This capability is transparent to the rule modelers so that they are only concerned with getting the rules right, and do not have to get wrapped up in SQL syntax to interface with the EDC database.
This chapter focuses on the aspects of rule modeling that are affected by a defined Corticon Enterprise Data Connector.
Enterprise Data Connector (EDC) — This technique provides access to a single database from a project Vocabulary. You map your Vocabulary to the database and rely on Corticon to retrieve data when needed. EDC makes data access very simple and is a great option when small amounts of data are needed or performance is not paramount. EDC is tightly integrated with rule models, so the functions described in this chapter are how you effectively create queries to the database.