Hi
some time ago, I have examined a number of pure Java databases.
There are some commercial products:
* cloudscape from IBM
and
* JDataStore from Borland
Both offer development licenses.
* I can't tell you much about PointBase
* my experiences with FirstSQL are somewhat limited: after playing around a
bit I
wrecked a database without being able to repair it. At that point I stopped
using it ;-)
* quadcap (www.quadcap.com) is an excellent FREE database. It is very
feature complete (it even has server-side cursors!) but I'm affraid it
doesn't scale very well. And it doesn't seem be to actively developed
anymore.
* InstantDB, McKoi and hsqldb are merely toys, as far as I can tell. But
they might be sufficient for simple applications.
* there is also a JDBC driver for MS Access files that has (a little) SQL
support.
Having said all this, I finally chose MySQL. It is fast, robust, easy to
administrate and it is free. And it's available on any Java-enabled
platform.
You can easily start a dedicated MySQL process to use it as an "embedded"
server in your Java application. I'm pretty sure that MySQL beats any Java
database in performance.
The only drawback with MySQL is that it can't handle complex queries very
well. Be prepared to invest some time on fine-tuning your SQL queries
(respectively, rewriting your code). But this is probably true for most Java
databases, too.
-- Peter
