A performance comparison of the Rete and TREAT algorithms for testing database rule conditions

The authors present the results of a simulation comparing the performance of the two most widely used production rule condition testing algorithms, Rete and TREAT, in the context of a database rule system. The results show that TREAT almost always outperforms Rete. TREAT requires less storage than Rete, and is less sensitive to optimization decisions than Rete. Based on these results, it is concluded that TREAT is the preferred algorithm for testing join conditions of database rules. Since Rete does outperform TREAT in some cases, this study suggests a next step which would be to develop a hybrid version of Rete and TREAT with an optimizer that would decide which strategy to use based on the rule definition and statistics about the data and update patterns