Utilizing rules in a distributed information sharing system

• US 20040034618A1
• Filed: 05/29/2003
• Published: 02/19/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 08/01/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Oracle International Corporation (Oracle Corporation)
• Inventors: Wang, Wei, Wong, Lik, Stamos, James, Lu, Edwina, Kaluskar, Sanjay, Bhatt, Neerja
• Granted Patent: US 7,613,741 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/27 Replication, distribution or synchronisation of data between databases or within a distributed database system; Distributed database system architectures therefor
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99953 Recoverability

Abstract

Described herein are various approaches that allow rules to be used to specify actions, that alleviate the complexity and burden of developing and maintaining rules in a rules-based messaging system, and that provide more efficient ways of evaluating rules. The approaches allow rules to specify user-defined transformation functions for transforming messages, to specify when and how to perform row migration, and to specify other types of actions. Rules are grouped into rule sets. Several types of rule sets, referred to as positive and negative rule sets, allow users to use rules that are less complex to develop and maintain. Rule sets are evaluated more efficiently by attempting to evaluate the rule set with less information than is needed to evaluate all the rules in the rule set. Also, the results of rules evaluations that are based on a set of values are cached for later retrieval.

Claims

1. A method for controlling a flow process that processes messages that flow between a source database server to a destination database server, wherein said messages reflect changes made at the source database server, the method comprising the steps of:

in response to the flow process processing a particular message of said messages, causing a rules engine to make an evaluation of a set of rules, wherein each rule of said set of rules is associated with a condition and first data that identifies an action;

for a particular rule of said set of rules whose corresponding condition is satisfied based on said evaluation, said rules engine returning said first data for said particular rule; and

said flow process performing the action identified by the first data returned by said rules engine.

2. The method of claim 1,

wherein the particular message describes an update to a row in a table at the source database server;

and

wherein the action identified is an insertion or deletion of a row in a table at the destination database server.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the action is an invocation of a function.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the function is registered by a user with a database server.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the action is to propagate the particular message to a message queue.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the action is a procedure to invoke in conjunction with discarding said particular message.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the flow process performs a particular action for said particular message only if said set of rules evaluates to FALSE.

8. The method claim 1, wherein the flow process performs a particular action for said particular message only if said set of rules evaluates to FALSE and a second set of rules evaluates to TRUE.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the second set of rules is not evaluated if said set of rules evaluates to TRUE.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein:

said set of rules includes multiple rule sets;

said flow process receives evaluation results for each rule set of said multiple rule sets; and

said flow process determines whether to perform a particular action based on a boolean combination of said multiple rule sets.

11. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 1.

12. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 2.

13. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 3.

14. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 4.

15. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 5.

16. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 6.

17. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 7.

18. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 8.

19. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 9.

20. A computer-readable medium carrying one or more sequences of instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, causes the one or more processors to perform the method recited in claim 10.