Coupling

There are two basic approaches to provide the functionality, which is described in Chapter 8, and comply with the requirements listed in Section 8.1. They concern the location where the inference engine is placed, in terms of cooperation with the database and the user. These are:

• Tight Coupling, the inference engine is integrated with the database server.
• Loose Coupling, a transparent interface between the user and the database.

Various pros and cons of these two approaches are analyzed below.