CodeFutures News & Industry Commentary Blog

I was aware of Apache Derby from IBM's PR around open sourcing IBM Cloudscape since last summer.

However, the announcement looked like yet-another-open-source-database. I didn't pay much attention -probably because for open source databases PostgreSQL and MySQL are very dominant with CodeFutures customers.

Then several weeks ago we got a request from a customer in South Africa to support Apache Derby. For CodeFutures, that mostly means testing and support for Derby-specific data types.

But once we looked at Apache Derby, we were highly impressed.

This is basically and IBM product, Cloudscape, donated to Apache. Now Apache has yet another major project. It's perhaps lost in the PR by JBoss/MySQL/Eclipse/Linux that Apache is still the major source and global center of open source software.

Because it's an IBM product, its very professionally packaged. You don't have to spend days installing and configuring (Hibernate take note!). It's also professionally documented, of course.

The product highlights are:
-100% Java - so works on any OS
-very small footprint
-zero administration (which means it embeddable)
-the usual claims about scalability, reliability, etc
-professionally packaged (very easy to install and configure)
-ISV-friendly Apache open source licensing
-available as IBM Cloudscape if technical support is required

Apache Derby is good, very good. CodeFutures is considering embedding it with one build of FireStorm/DAO and making it a download option so developers can test generated code end-to-end immediately. Not every Java developer has a database installed locally or available to test FireStorm/DAO. So it would be another step towards making life easier for Java developers.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software