Has anyone successfully used Drools as a kind of "rating engine" before? What are your experiences?
I'm trying to process a couple of millions of records (of slightly different types) and apply rating/pricing to these records.
Rating would be based of tables or database lookups as well as chains of if/then/else/else/else/else conditions using the lookup data.
Traditional rating engines don't employ rule mechanisms in ways that I'm comfortable with...
thanks for your help
To provide a slightly more informative response (although your question can't be answered based on the very vague description you've given), your "rating" is just one of the many names for what I use to call "classification problem". It has been solved many times using Drools.
However, this doesn't mean to say that your problem, with its particular environmental flavour and expected performance (how fast do you want to have the 2M records processed?) can be solved best using Drools - especially when the measure for deciding the quality isn't settled. (For instance: Is ease of maintenance more important than top efficiency?)
Go ahead and rig up a prototype and run a test to see how it goes. That will give you a more reliable answer than anything else. If someone says that something similar couldn't be done, it could be due to bad rule coding. If someone says that something similar was done successfully, it may not have had one of the quirks of your setup. And so on.