Hi, the manual says (http://db.apache.org/derby/docs/10.1/devguide/rdevdvlp38881.html): "classpath Databases are treated as read-only databases, and all databaseNames must begin with at least a slash, because you specify them "relative" to the classpath directory." Now I wonder why that is so ? Is there a particular reason to treat these always as read-only ? If the classpath points to a local directory (as opposed to, say, a jar), Derby could easily resolve this to a real path and work with this. This would allow web applications to be created with an initial, embedded Derby database without having to hard-code the absolute database path (no assumption can be made as to where the current working directory is when running in a servlet container, so the path must be absolute). Tom