xml-dev - Re: RELAX to ISO

[Rick JELLIFFE <ricko@geotempo.com>]

"Bullard, Claude L (Len)" wrote:
> 
> Business rules as an artificial category.  Why artificial?

Because it sometimes seems that people say "business rules" when they
mean "every constraint that cannot be represented by my schema
language".  So a business rule is a constraint (or function) that the
database designer can leave to the applications programmers while (s)he
concentrates on DDL or whatever.

So "business rules", used like that, are an artifact of the limits of
schema languages which either cannot express dynamic constraints between
data or which are only useful for defining data rather than usages of
data in various circumstances.

But, of course, I am aware that "busines rules" are also used in another
way, to mean functions rather than constraints per se.

Rick Jelliffe