I finally broke down and wrote RollingFileStream which provides (and borrows) most of the functionality of java.logger.FileHandler to provide a rolling file stream. Having derby.log grow forever on long running systems is just not acceptable anymore ;) Realistically, I would like to provide this back to the derby community somehow as I found many requests for such a feature while searching and many references to using "derby.stream.error.method" or "derby.stream.error.field", but no good implementation of such.
I built a DerbyUtil.jar which the class along with a configurator class which can read a "derbylog.properties" file for configuration information. I would like to locate this file at the same place as "derby.properties" so the configurator needs to find out what "derby.system.home" is set to. Because of the default security policy installed by the network server and because my DerbyUtil.jar is separate, it cannot access the property. Create and installing my own security policy is also a bit of a pain as the network server is started by Glassfish and there really is not much opportunity to pass startup parameters. So is there someway to locate the location that "derby.ssystem.home" is pointing to in my class that is being invoke by "derby.stream.error.field"? How about a proposal that "derby.stream.error.field" can point to a static method that can take 0 or 1 parameters and if one parameter, it is passed the value of "derby.system.home" as a String. This seems to be a simple change and could easily be accommodated by first using reflection to find the method that takes 0 parameters and if not found, retry with finding the method that takes one string parameter? Brett
