You could potentially have two instances of a Derby system (JVM) running on the same machine at the same time. Each instance must run in a different JVM. Two separate instances of Derby must not access the same database. For example, in an embedded environment, an application that accesses Derby databases starts up the local JDBC driver, which starts up an instance of Derby. If you start another application, such as ij, and connect to the same database, severe database corruption can result. See Double-booting system behavior.