We were required to develop a user-configurable calculation engine to interface to a SAP R3 system. This system would allow the user to specify their own calculation formulae for implementation, as well as build their own business model allowing them to specify business entities and the relationships between them.

A traditional approach would be to build custom modules for each implementation, but, due to the rapidly changing nature of some of the markets within which it would be deployed, this was not a viable option as there would be insufficient time to make system changes when these events occurred. Rather than develop our own formula parser, we were able to use innovative database and query design to leverage the SQL Server SQL parser. A key part of this was being able to run our calculations in a set-based manner, which had significant performance benefits. Reusing the SQL Server SQL parser meant that we were able to reduce significantly the required development and testing cycles.