A Derby database provides persistent storage and recovery. Derby ensures that all committed transactions are durable, even if the system fails, through the use of a database transaction log.
Whereas inserts, updates, and deletes may be cached before being written to disk, log entries tracking all those changes are never cached but always forced to disk when a transaction commits. If the system or operating system fails unexpectedly, when Derby next starts up it can use the log to perform recovery, recovering the "lost" transactions from the log and rolling back uncommitted transactions. Recovery ensures that all committed transactions at the time the system failed are applied to the database, and all transactions that were active are rolled back. Thus the databases are left in a consistent, valid state.
In normal operation, Derby keeps the log small through periodic checkpoints. Checkpointing marks the portions of the log that are no longer useful, writes changed pages to disk, then truncates the log.
Derby checkpoints the log file as it fills. It also checkpoints the log when a shutdown command is issued. Shutting down the JVM in which Derby is running without issuing the proper shutdown command is equivalent to a system failure from Derby's point of view.
Booting a database means that Derby checks to see if recovery needs to be run on a database. Recovery can be costly, so using the proper shutdown command improves connection or startup performance.