A business rule for Data Archive is the technical representation of a functional requirement. If the rule is the INVOICE IS NOT CLOSED, then there is a field in a table that tells us that an invoice is not closed. Note that rule is INVOICE IS NOT CLOSED as opposed to INVOICE IS CLOSED. Business rules in Data Archive identify transactions that cannot be archived and purged. So the business rules are looking for transaction that FAIL rules. This is important to remember when creating business rules.

As mentioned previously, the enforcement of business rules are tracked in columns in the interim table. That is, each business rule is represented as a column in the interim table. If a sample business rule is INVOICE IS NOT CLOSED, the column in the interim table may be "INVOICE_IS_NOT_CLOSED". We also just described how business rules identify transactions that cannot be archived or purged. If a transaction fails the business rule, then the business rule column is updated with a 1. If a transaction passes the business rule, then the business rule column is updated with a 0. A business rule, therefore, is a SQL UPDATE statement. The UPDATE statement updates transactions in the interim table according to the business rule criteria. Specifically, the UPDATE statement affects transactions that have failed the business rule.