I am getting an exception trying to delete a record that I added not long before (as part of a unit test)
Sometimes unit test frameworks do really clever things, too clever in fact. For example, I've seen unit test frameworks for database applications which have automatically "cleanup" code which completely removes the entire directory tree which was being used by the test, in order to release the disk space and prevent clutter from accumulating. Only, it turned out that the framework removed the folder tree while the test was still running. One thing you can do to try to get more information is to make sure you are getting the *full* exception trace, not the abbeviated one. See: http://wiki.apache.org/db-derby/UnwindExceptionChain Another thing you might try is to run your unit tests with Derby configured so that it has logStatementText=true, and then look at your derby.log after the test runs to get a better idea about how far your test ran, and what was going on just before the failure. bryan