The behaviour of rules in  an active database system can be
difficult to predict, and much work has been devoted to the
development of automatic support for reasoning about properties
such as confluence and termination.
We show how abstract interpretation can provide a generic framework for
analysis of active rules.
Abstract interpretation is a well-understood, semantics-based method
for static analysis.
Its advantage, apart from generality, lies in the separation of
concerns: Once the underlying semantics has been captured formally,
a variety of analyses can be derived, almost for free, as 
approximations to the semantics.
Moreover, powerful general theorems enable simple proofs of
global correctness and uniform termination of specific analyses.

We outline these ideas and present, as an example application,
a new method for termination analysis.
In terms of precision, the method compares favourably with previous 
approaches to the problem.
This is because the method investigates the flow of data rather than just 
the syntax of conditions and actions.