can it be used for big enterprise applications?
Yes!
does data access and write operations gets slow down as volume of data increases over time?
Somewhat, but you can get tens of millions of rows into a well-designed Derby database without any noticable slowdown.
is there any limitations of derby...?
Yes. However, every big enterprise application I know of encounters database system limitations, and deals with them using the standard techniques of big enterprise applications: partition and replicate your data, update it asynchronously, distribute it over multiple machines, etc. As with all database applications, step 1 is your database design, and the basic principles are both database-independent and well-established over decades of experience. So long as you follow those, Derby works well to surprisingly large scales. bryan
