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ECA Rules

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Triggers; Event-condition-action rules; Reactive rules

Definition

An ECA rule has three parts: an event, a condition, and an action. The semantics of an ECA rule are: when the event has been detected, evaluate the condition, and if the condition is satisfied, execute the action.

Historical Background

ECA rules are used within active databases for supporting reactive behavior and were first proposed in the HiPAC project [2].

Foundations

The semantics of an ECA rule is straightforward: when an event is detected, evaluate the condition, and if the condition is true, then execute the action. There are a number of reasons why the reactive behavior is abstracted to three different parts [1]:

First of all, events, conditions, and actions have different roles. An event specifies when to trigger a rule, a condition specifies what to check, and an action specifies what to execute in response to the event. Thus, the semantics of an ECA rule is clean, and avoids ad hoc mixing of events,...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Dayal U. Ten years of activity in active database systems: what have we accomplished? In Proc. First Int. Workshop on Active and Real-Time Database Systems, 1995, pp. 3–22.

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  2. Dayal U., Blaustein B., Buchmann A., et al. S.C. HiPAC: a research project in active, time-constrained database management. Tech. Rep. CCA-88-02, Xerox Advanced Information Technology. Cambridge, MA, USA, 1988.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Skövde, Skövde, Sweden

    Mikael Berndtsson & Jonas Mellin

Authors
  1. Mikael Berndtsson
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  2. Jonas Mellin
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Berndtsson, M., Mellin, J. (2009). ECA Rules. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_504

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