jfalgout

Derby is an excellent embedded database when working with Java. I've worked on a project for over a year now that is using Derby in an embedded fashion. We use Derby embedded within a data profiling product. The purpose of the product is to help business users understand the nature of their data and also to audit data.

Derby is used as the container of data and the generated metrics. A Derby database is created for every execution and is populated by the engine that generates the metric results. The created database is queried when an end user clicks on a graph within a report. For example, if a user runs an equal range binning metric on a numeric field, the input data is binned into a fixed number of buckets. The population of each bucket is graphed and presented to the user. If the user clicks on a part of the graph (lets say bin 1), the Derby database is queried to find all rows that fall into that bin. The data is then displayed using a data browser.

The "drill down" feature of this product has been a very popular one with users and would have been much harder to create without Derby. The small footprint of Derby is amazing given the amount of functionality it provides. I highly recommend Derby for ease of use and true embed-ability.