Apache Derby is an embedded relational database management system, originally developed by IBM and called IBM Cloudscape.
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Progress OpenEdge
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Progress OpenEdge is an application development environment to keep businesses running, that enables users to leverage technology advancements to more quickly deliver business applications.
Derby is absolutely the best when it comes to needing a small, embeddable RDBMS in your applications. Certain jobs, like Risk Modeling, are perfect for a database that is small enough to fit into memory with no trouble then store data from various sources, and then allow a user to access those data sets quickly.
Openedge is very well suited for financial based applications for 2 reasons. First, it has very powerful transaction scoping that will commit or back out of all changes in a transaction at once. This ensure that your data is "in sync." Second, it offers after imaging roll forward and replication for environments that require high availability or powerful disaster recovery in place.
Openedge databases are practically bulletproof, even when shot down abnormally. The offer complete transaction scoping, before imagining, and also after imaging for roll foward capability.
Openedge has a very powerful and easy to learn 4GL programming language that can be used in a traditional or object oriented manner.
Openedge also has powerful web services components, fully integrating both SOAP and RESTful web services.
Openedge is completely scaleable from 1 user to a fully distributed global enterprise solution.
Not as well positioned in the market as the "big dogs" (Oracle, MSSQL)
Been around awhile, and not a lot of exposure. This I believe is primarily due to it's relation to the Apache Project (which is not bad, but they don't force big, lumbering corporate volume licensing on you), and thus people are a bit gun-shy about NOT throwing money at something
Java is still "slow" compared to C/C++, thus making Derby a bit slow too
SQLite is another open-source zero-cost file-based SQL-capable database solution and is a good alternative to Apache Derby, especially for non-Java-based solutions. We chose Apache Derby as it is Java-based, and so is the solution we embedded it in. However, SQLite has a similar feature set and is widely used in the industry to serve the same purposes for native solutions such as C or C++-based products.
The decision to use openedge with our particular product was made such a long time ago that I certainly was not around to make the decision. And most of the other products that would have been compared at the time are likely no longer around. Which does speak to the longevity and benefits of this product. When you look back and see how long the same product has been going forward with constant improvements and remaining relevant without major disruptive changes, it is worthy of some credit.
