FICO® Blaze Advisor® Discussion

[g8rpal]

I've been googling to no avail.  Perhaps someone here can help.  Does anyone know if anyone has ever successfully used Blaze Advisor in conjunction with Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) for their ETL processes?  Are there any tutorials or documentation that are specific to people who hope to achieve this?  I've searched the site but find nothing when I search for SSIS or ETL.  

Based on what I've garnered so far about Blaze I have questions regarding how it would work with SSIS through the script task.  Is it able to perform set based operations or does it have to take a row by row approach?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

[Andrei]

I was looking at SSIS for one project but since calling Blaze web service from a CLR stored procedure was sufficient for my needs I stopped there... There is probably a way to call Blaze as a local task from the SSIS flow, I am just not an expert in this area.

We do implement ETL processes with Blaze frequently when there is a lot of business logic involved, but more often than not it's just a batch program that opens database connection, runs a query and then just loops through a recordset to process each record in Blaze. With local SQL Server instance and Blaze in compiled sequential mode I got up to several thousand records per second processed on a dual core server. And of course, it can scale quite well in clustered environment, just do some record partitioning.

[g8rpal]

Thank you for your reply.  I've been doing alot of thinking in preparation for this project about how I could make our SSIS packages more configurable and dynamic if I wanted to support a business rules engine without knowing a whole lot about how Blaze works.  One of my colleagues actually got my bells ringing by thinking about populating a table to query the rules engine at the start of the master package to get the current rules.  Thinking about it that way makes it seem straight forward.  I was hoping for a jump start by finding someone who might have experience trying to do the same. 

Is there a way to query the business rules database directly to simply get a definition of the current rules?

Thinking about what in an ETL process might be configurable or in other words, easy candidates for a business rules engine, I am thinking anywhere that there is a case statement or some sort of where clause filter.

I feel like we are the guinea pigs here though without being able to find substantial material on the web about people who have experienced the same.

Again, thank you so much for taking the time to reply.

Mike

[g8rpal · Accepted solution]

Bump.  Can anyone assist?

[wmwasson · Accepted solution]

I've been researching similar type of functionality, but like you, have had minimal success finding anything on the web.  I agree with the approach.  The use case that I have is to extract from an integrated ODS/DW a list of opportunities and do interrogation of those opportunities via the decision service and publish those to a case management application.

    Another alternative that I've been curious about is whether or not FICO has had any success getting these Blaze rules or decision services pushed down to the database level as well.  If the database can execute Java, should it theoretically be able to able to execute via a function call at the DB level?

Thoughts?  I'd like to see use find a good solution that will work.

[g8rpal · Accepted solution]

Just did a blog post to address this.  I provided a tutorial on how to integrate Blaze w/ SSIS.  It wasn't easy.... but it worked.

The Degenerate Dimension Blog - SSIS and Blaze Integration