Just to chime in here. We also use Derby for deployment, and are having the same grief with setup time for unit tests
For what it's worth, Derby itself uses Derby in its own unit tests (of course), and overall we have quite good performance, I believe, in the Derby unit tests themselves.
The Derby source tree contains extensive tests and test utilities, and is a great source of ideas about how to set up unit tests to work with a database efficiently. You might try exploring that body of testing code, and you might try contacting the folks on the derby-dev list to discuss the particular issues you're seeing. There's also an extensive section in the Derby wiki which discusses the technique behind the Derby unit testing harness. I believe that, with a certain amount of care, you should be able to achieve quite good performance for your unit testing using Derby. thanks, bryan
