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A high-level assessment of a wide variety of open source solutions was undertaken that could potentially address all or some of the Ed-Fi Level 2 Data Validation System Requirements.  A high-level analysis of the tools that were considered can be found hereat  Survey of Rule Engines.  However, the final approach taken was to take a deeper look at three different types of solutions from this list. The first one was to look at an open-source business rules engine . The second was to experiment with using a database-centric testing framework. The third was to look at what a pure-SQL implementation without external tool dependencies might look like.

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The resulting spreadsheet can be seen here.

Results

Business rule engines are well suited for complex logic flows and decision trees.  However, most of the validation rules that were gathered as examples do not necessarily have complex linear decisions, it is more of a matter of finding specific examples in a complex data set.   This means that expressing these rules in the language that the rules engine is looking for might require a level of abstraction and complexity than it would be to do something closer to the data.

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