A couple of weeks ago I showed you how to build a dynamic rule based decision tree in Neo4j. It was pretty simple and used an Expression Evaluator to determine if a set of parameters in an expression was true or false. Based on that answer it decided where to go.
But what if we had more than just true or false? What if we wanted to make our Rule nodes have more than 2 options? Today I am going to show you how to do just that… but please make sure you have read part 1 already.
Last year Microsoft announced “Cosmos DB”, a multi-modal database with graph support. I think multi-modal databases are like swiss army knifes, they can do everything, just not very well. I imagine you would design it to be as good as it can be at its main use case while not losing the ability to do other things. So it’s neither fully optimized for its main thing, nor very good at the other things. Maybe you can do pretty well with two things by making a few compromises, but if you try to do everything…it’s just not going to work out.
Can you imagine John Rambo stalking his enemies with an oversized swiss army knife? Here, let me help with the mental image:
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A few posts ago I showed you how to build a Boolean Logic Rules Engine in Neo4j. What I like about it is that we’ve pre-calculated all our potential paths, so it’s just a matter of matching up our facts to the paths to get to the rule and we’re done. But today I am going to show you a different approach where we are going to have to calculate what is true as we go along a decision tree to see which answer we get to.
Yes, it will be a bit slower than the first approach, but we avoid pre-calculation. It also makes things a bit more dynamic, as we can change the decision tree variables on the fly. The idea is to merge code and data into one, to gain the benefit of agility.
Max De Marzi 