The Winding Journey of Java DB
Java SE 6 has finally arrived on the Mac with a recent update, so I was over on Sun’s website reading about all the new stuff and Java DB caught my eye. This is a small, all-Java database that can be embedded in applications on a desktop, a server, or a mobile device. The reason I find this interesting is Java DB and I go back a few (technology) lifetimes.
Java DB is based on Apache Derby, which is an open source project that IBM spun out from a product called Cloudscape, which they acquired as part of the purchase of Informix, which itself had acquired Cloudscape as a two-year-old startup with around 50 employees in the go-go year of 1999.
Way back then, I was in the process of looking for my very first developer job (with no qualifications, I might add). A few projects later, and my team had selected Cloudscape as our best bet for a cross platform client-server system to teach struggling kids how to read. This was back when you had to shell out $50k to use the software. In an act of surprising optimism, they put me on the project as the database lead! The first thing I did was buy a shelf-load of books about databases. I was so green I wrote my own connection pool! Java development on Mac OS classic was hell, but Cloudscape blew my mind because you could use objects as a column type, and invoke methods on them from inside a SQL statement. A glance at the docs suggests it doesn’t work this way anymore, though they do have an XML column type.
It’s good to know that some good software can survive the corporate churn-and-burn. Who knows, maybe I’ll use Java DB née Derby née Cloudscape again in the near future.
Comments
Too bad derby (and probably javaDB as well) does not support limit and offset queries. Other than that it is quite nice. You can hack around the limit one by forcing it with JDBC max rows but I think this is a major missing feature.
Leave a Comment