David Van Couvering 's Blog

Multi-gig databases in Java DB? You Betcha

Working in NetBeans, I have noticed that Java DB is incredibly solid: it Just Works. It starts quickly, it runs well, it does everything you need it to do.

But in some ways I think this can actually mislead people into thinking "well, it's so small and easy to use, it must be just a developer database." Sometimes I wonder, maybe if Java DB required a big installation and lots of set up, people might tend to think it's a Real Database. You know, like all those other Enterprisey tools -- it must be enterprise ready, because it's so complicated and "rich" in functionality.

So I thought this email from Nurullah Akkaya on the derby-user list was quite telling. Nurullah switched from Oracle to Derby to handle a cluster of servers, each with its own instance of Derby running embedded and inserting a million rows a day. Each database instance is 20GB and growing. And he says that his system performance increased significantly after doing the switch. You can't do this with "just a developer database."

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