Currently we have embedded Derby DB installed on every developer computer. I have some problem according to this:

Derby supports only one connection simultaneously. I have to shut down WAS to examine DB structure and content with any Visual tool. Also I have no idea if it is even possible to use any profiler to watch what’s going on with DB when Commerce works. Do you use Derby? Does every developer in your team has his own database or DB is centralized and shared? Any possible disadvantages if I replace all developers Derby with local db2? 

Thanks.

We're only 2 WC developers in our team, but we each use our own DB2 environment on our workstation.
If you use a centralized DB2 database you will need to be very careful when you publish stores cause you will need to keep the file systems synchronized between the workstations that use the same database.
So, I think it's best to have separate DB2 environments.

You are not using Derby, aren't you? What were your reasons to use DB2? As I can see it's more complicated to administer.

Derby is not suitable to use for the production and test server, so we have always used DB2 for the servers,
and we wanted the development environments to match the server environments as good as possible.
One of the reason is that we have to do a lot of dataload testing in the development environment.

Derby is not very stable for enterprise ERP and data migration/Data pump/Replication etc across heterogeneous environments, We know it is file-based and good for testing and existing inside apps, but running as a net service it is a bit flaky in essence it doesn't cut the admin grade. MySQL is much better, tunable like BB/.2 ans simple free and easy to set up for testing. Let's face it for enterprise corps this is a lot either DB2 or Oracle/Rac etc about 50/50 in my experience. Using Derby also means your code has to be truly agnostic which is good. I find that in the end any JDBC, JPA, persistence in corp's is a bundle of versions and opinions, open source and internal libs/APIs.

Despite the belief there is change and configuration management it doesn't suffice for stopping each new programme/project from moving away into new approaches/APIs which can be good for a quick win, bu very bad later in end of life situations. So if you are building a stand alone env ie WAS instance as part of a pre-packaged product EAR then fine, quick dirty and works.

However if WAS ND and your product has to go into larger customer's sites, then I would recommend that you think about true packaging and deployment code to allow customers to deploy how they want into their own home grown or commercial deployment tools. I do use Derby when the need arises, though admin is a bit messy, but there are now some simple Open source UI tools. Mostly need to resort to command line interface which I find annoying when in a huury to just view data and quicky chnage structure as part of a desing concetp.

I use Derby in some of my courses, but most clients/students end up wanting a DB2 or Oracle example even if it is DB2 Exress or Oracle Xe etc. This way they learn how to connect with pool settings and understand JDBC strings better as there are quite a few variants on configuring Data-sources and providers drivers and the WAA config templates wich drive the Admin consoile GUI are quite verbose, but limited for the Open source guys.

I have a good article on how to use MySQL driver and thus shows how WAS can support this kind of system. If linuix is your dev/test environment for conceptual stuff then MySQl is fast and massively tunable. I use it all my websites. Here is a link www.websphereusergroup.org/steverobinson.... Anyway just some thoughts to get the juices flowing on using Derby. I must say that for perfection Dev/Test/PreProd/Prod environments etc should all use the same DB for the correct promotional model that we expect to see as professional in an enterprise.It will save time and money foresting version/releases/regression etc.