Currently I store all rules files on the file system (there are lots of versions of them) and load the different versions of them into memory at startup. I would like to change
Well, you might want to look at Guvnor as a way of providing rule management.
But in short, no, you'll have to write your own.
Keep in mind you don't need a file in between, you can read the string representation of the rule out of the db and just compile that.