An embedded database is useful during the development phase of a project due to its lightweight nature. Ease of configuration, quick startup time, testability, and the ability to rapidly evolve SQL during development are just some of the benefits of using an embedded database.

When you wish to expose an embedded database instance as a bean in a Spring ApplicationContext, use the embedded-database tag in the spring-jdbc namespace:

    <jdbc:embedded-database id="dataSource">
        <jdbc:script location="classpath:schema.sql"/>
        <jdbc:script location="classpath:test-data.sql"/>
    </jdbc:embedded-database>
  			

The configuration above creates an embedded HSQL database populated with SQL from schema.sql and testdata.sql resources in the classpath. The database instance is made available to the Spring container as a bean of type javax.sql.DataSource. This bean can then be injected into data access objects as needed.

The EmbeddedDatabaseBuilder class provides a fluent API for constructing an embedded database programmatically. Use this when you need to create an embedded database instance in a standalone environment, such as a data access object unit test:

    EmbeddedDatabaseBuilder builder = new EmbeddedDatabaseBuilder();
    EmbeddedDatabase db = builder.type(H2).script("schema.sql").script("test-data.sql").build();
    // do stuff against the db (EmbeddedDatabase extends javax.sql.DataSource)
    db.shutdown()
  			

Spring Jdbc's embedded database support can be extended in two ways:

You are encouraged to contribute back extensions to the Spring community at jira.springframework.org.