A SQL based Business Rules Engine

Looking for a SQL Rules Engine? Get started with LogicLoop.

What is a SQL Business Rules engine?

Business Rules Engines has been around the software world for over a decade. A BRE is simply a piece of software that follows some chain of logic to execute a business workflow. In today’s modern environment, these tools are often referred to as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), workflow automation, low code or drag-and-drop no code. Similarly, the SQL data querying language has been around for decades. With the rise of data warehouses, data quality and transformation tools, as well as JSON APIs, SQL has proved itself to be the lingua franca of working with data. Naturally then, there is a huge opportunity to improve business workflows with the next iteration of internal tooling: a SQL-based Rules Engine. 

How can business rules be applied?

Business logic is all around us. If you've ever had to:

• Set up an onboarding workflow e.g. send all new users who have not activated a reminder email within 3 days
• Flag a transaction for fraud e.g. send all payments > $10,000 to an analyst for manual review
• Issue a discount e.g find all the super-users of your service and send them a special promotion
• Maintain systems operability e.g. alert if an external third-party API service is down for more than 5 minutes

Then you have used one flavor of a business rules engine or another. On the simpler side, the "business rules engine" is just logic that lives inside your own head, or on an excel spreadsheet. On the more complex side, you can use vendor tooling or have engineers build a custom internal rules engine for you.

Finding the right rules engine can increase your operating leverage

In today's fast-growth world, operating efficiency is crucial to any scaling startup. If you're looking for a business workflow engine to improve your company's operating efficiency, a few keys factors are important: 

• Ease of use - the tooling has to be quick to set up and accessible to various users across the company, not just engineers. It should be easy to create, edit, and iterate on a new workflow.
• Flexibility and complexity - each business is different, and many businesses have complex logic that don't fit into a simple drag-and-drop interface. The tool needs to be able to scale and grow with the complexity of the business.
• Maintainability - the tool should be collaborative, trackable, and easy to maintain over time.

Ultimately, the tool should help you automate manual tasks and save your team time.

When things are working properly, it will feel like magic and you'll wonder why you ever wasted time doing things manually before.

LogicLoop: SQL-Based Business Rules Engine

While old school Business Rules Engines like Drools or InRule have evolved over time to support increasing complexity, in the world of modern UI interfaces, they are extremely difficult to use and maintain. The need for speed, flexibility, and maintainability led to LogicLoop: the marriage of the data-driven Business Rules Engine. LogicLoop allows you to connect your database, write a SQL query on top, and have the results of the query trigger a downstream action. Here's why our SQL-based Rules Engine saves tech companies a ton of time:

• Ease of use - Data is eating the world and SQL is the lingua franca of working with data. Learning SQL is now the top career booster for non-engineers at tech companies. If you already know SQL, there is no learning curve to using LogicLoop, and you're ready to be productive from day 1.
• Flexibility and complexity - SQL is an extremely flexible language and capable of expressing complex business logic. With LogicLoop, you can plug-and-play and have your SQL queries trigger a number of popular downstream integrations like email, Slack, Zapier, PagerDuty, Asana, and more.
• Maintainability - LogicLoop features a collaborative interface and stores the history of all edits made and actions taken so you can easily maintain your rules over time. We capture the benefits of "coding" by offering features traditionally used by software engineers like version history and testing, while making it accessible in an intuitive UI interface for the business operator or analyst.

Check out our template library to explore how various applications of a business rules engine can help improve your company operations.

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Get your SQL Rules Engine up today

If you're looking to empower business operators, save engineering time, and increase your company's operating efficiency, sign up to get a free demo of LogicLoop today or get started now and setup in less than 15 minutes.

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