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Comments on What is a good modern language to use for a Business Rules project?
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What is a good modern language to use for a Business Rules project?
This is a rather vague question, but I'm trying to solve a specific problem and I'm inexperienced in most of the potential solutions, so please forgive the inherent ambiguity.
I have access to a database with millions of historical financial transactions, with new transactions being added every day. Based on these transactions I want to apply several hundreds of business rules. These could be things like, "apply sales tax per lookup table based on city and state," or "record commissions based on the internal salesperson and their commission rate." It could also include things like, "bill client X twice per month between April and October at rate R1 for type A transactions and rate R2 for type B transactions, and a flat $100 per month from November to March."
Eventually I'd like for the business rules to be programmable via a web interface, but that's unnecessary at the beginning. My main concern is creating a system that is reliable and flexible enough to handle this level of complexity while still being relatively maintainable and comprehensible.
Unfortunately, it seems that COBOL is one of the most popular languages for this kind of problem, but I'd rather not go that route. I've used R and SQL at much smaller scale in a similar problem space, but it wasn't ideal. I'm familiar in passing with BREs like Drools, but have never actually worked with them, and my general perception is that they are often difficult to maintain.
I don't mind learning a new stack for this project; Go, python, or Rust have all caught my eye in the past. But I keep wondering if I'm missing something that has more inherent support for this use case.
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SQL is the right tool for this job.
- You say the data is already in a database, probably a SQL database
- You don't have to deal with moving the data out of the database and "into a programming language" as you would with others
- This is an extremely common application of SQL, and you will find a plethora of relevant examples, guides and tools (including web based editors) online for it
- Many SQL engines have sophisticated query optimization features that will automatically improve the performance of your queries while you focus on the result you want
You say your experience using SQL was not ideal. I'm baffled. There are billion dollar businesses that run on the premise that it is, in fact, ideal. Your examples sound to me like classic SQL exercises. I would recommend you take each example rule, and ask a separate question like: "How to apply sales tax per lookup table based on city and state in SQL?" By the way, for something like that, you will need to find a lookup table of taxes by location - that will often also be available as a SQL DB from third parties.
Note that you also mention recurring processes, like "twice per month". This is a scheduling problem and no language supports this out of the box. You will have to use a separate scheduler that will have its own peculiarities, to actually put tasks on a schedule. Some examples include cron (becoming obsolete), systemd timers, Airflow. Some database engines also have a concept of scheduled tasks/jobs.
For other languages you listed:
- Python is probably the easiest after SQL. You will still have to deal with database I/O as a needless extra step, however some very complex rules may be easier than in SQL. It really depends on what rules exactly you need to implement. I said you should ask how to do each example in SQL, you should also ask for Python and compare the answer to decide what you'd rather deal with. Python is a very complex and sophisticated language, compared to SQL, don't be deceived by its apparent simplicity.
- R will require some busywork to push/pull data from the database. The syntax for data manipulation will be a bit more complex and cumbersome than SQL in your case, with little benefit. The benefit of R is its extensive, correct implementations of statistical and data analysis formulae, and powerful plotting libraries. You are using neither of these and IMO it's not worth it for you to deal with its limitations.
- Rust is a language designed to provide tight control over the low-level details of programs, like memory assignment. Its benefit is potentially better performance, and drawback is that high-level tasks require a lot more code and complexity to implement. I would consider it a terrible choice for what you want to do. Go is similar, although it is slightly less low level.
- COBOL is ancient, it would be masochistic to attempt to use it in this century.
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