Corticon provides three mechanisms that let you interface your rules with databases and other data sources:

  • 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 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.
  • REST Datasource (REST service) — This read-only technique provides secure access to REST services to retrieve data for use in your decision services. Queries—either preset or specified by data in your payload—limit the results brought into the server's memory, which are then filtered to get the data needed to enrich the rule in process.
For additional information, see the Data Integration topics

Overview

Corticon lets you define mappings to a Datasource 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 into SQL syntax to interface with an EDC Datasource.

This section focuses on the aspects of rule modeling that are affected by a defined Corticon Enterprise Data Connector.

While you could start learning how to use any of these Datasources, it is a good idea to start with Getting Started with EDC.