Further Steps with Derby: Defining and Accessing Your Data
Today’s data center is a crowded place, packed with machines, applications, and databases. In many cases, the machine population is so high that power and cooling resources are stretched to the breaking point.
Blade servers are to some extent helping to solve this problem by consolidating servers onto a single card (or blade) that fits into what becomes a multi-server chassis.
However, even with blade servers there is still a limit on the number of physical machines that can fit in the data center. This applies to applications, application servers, web servers, and database servers.
It’s possible that the open-source world may be able to help the data center out in the form of Derby.
Derby and Support
There is one important point that relates to technical support for open-source products: It tends to be patchy!
Obviously, if your application is mission-critical and enterprise-scale, it’s likely that you will go with one of the big database vendors. However, Derby lends itself to small non-critical applications where a database is useful.
For the latter, it’s not such a big deal that your technical query is not answered immediately!