I'm starting work on some DB tuning utilities written in Java. I am running the utilities on my local machine against remote servers and I needed a way to hold some data locally. The volume of data I plan on storing is more than I would feel comfortable keeping in local properties or XML files and I didn't want to deal with setting up an Oracle XE instance just to service my lightweight utilities so I checked into a bunch of embedded databases. Embedded databases are databases that I can wrap into my application.