A formal description of a database consists of the description of the relations (tables) of the database together with the constraints that must hold on the database. Furthermore the contents of a database can be retrieved using queries. These constraints and queries for databases can very well be formalized. A formal description of a constraint or a query is necessary to describe the constraint or query unambiguously. In other words, a formal description leads to one and only one meaning of the constraint or query. To describe constraints and queries in a formal way we use predicate logic, set theory and tuple relational calculus. The tuple relational calculus is a calculus based on the use of tuple variables. A tuple variable is a variable that ranges over a named relation (i.e. a set of tuples of a relation). This paper describes the use of the relational calculus for databases. A description of the formal notation is given as well as a mapping of these expressions to SQL.
Business rules play a critical role during decision making when executing business processes. Existing modelling techniques for business rules offer modellers guidelines on how to create models that are consistent, complete and syntactically correct. However, modelling guidelines that address manageability in terms of anomalies such as insertion, update and deletion are not widely available. This paper presents a normalisation procedure that provides guidelines for managing and organising business rules. The procedure is evaluated by means of an experiment based on existing case study material. Results show that the procedure is useful for minimising insertion and deletion anomalies.
The main question in this PhD thesis is: How can Business Rules Management be configured and valued in organizations? A BRM problem space framework is proposed, existing of service systems, as a solution to the BRM problems. In total 94 vendor documents and approximately 32 hours of semi-structured interviews were analyzed. This analysis revealed nine individual service systems, in casu elicitation, design, verification, validation, deployment, execution, monitor, audit, and version. In the second part of this dissertation, BRM is positioned in relation to BPM (Business Process Management) by means of a literature study. An extension study was conducted: a qualitative study on a list of business rules formulated by a consulting organization based on the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission risk framework. (from the summary of the Thesis p. 165)
