Today (June 19, 2026), Pixar releases Toy Story 5, the fifth installment of a series that began in 1995 as the first full-length movie created entirely with computer animation, Toy Story.
Early next year, SAP will release SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 2027, or BI 2027, the sixth installment (aka BI 4.5) of the SAP BusinessObjects 4.x platform released in 2011. Based on a product originally released in 1990, the year Pixar released the short film Knick Knack, featuring the Bobby McFerrin tune of the same name [Watch Knick Knack on Disney+].
After BI 2025 dropped a multitude of little-used features like Oprah on an Ozempic glow-up (see SAP KB 3560025), one would think that there wouldn’t be much legacy debt left in BI 2027.
But one could be wrong.
SAP published KB 3758205 earlier this month (June 1, 2026), with the chipper title “Apache Derby 10.14.3 Update Planned for SAP BO 2027 Release”. John Ratzenberger, Pixar’s “good luck charm,” has voiced a character in nearly every Pixar film since the original Toy Story. Apache Derby, on the other hand, is no such good luck charm for SAP BusinessObjects.
Is there anything that could be possibly worse than SAP planning to include Apache Derby 10.14.3? Well, there is. It’s posted on the front page of the Apache Derby website:
Derby Retired
On 2025-10-10, the Derby developers voted to retire the project into a read-only state. Derby development and bug-fixing have ended. No further releases will be published. The Derby website and wiki are frozen in place. Derby JIRA issues are now read-only and new bugs cannot be logged. The user and developer lists are disabled and can be accessed only through their archives.
To provide some background, in 2012 BusinessObjects customers discovered that not only was SAP using Apache Derby under the hood of BI 4.1, but its use created headaches for clustered landscapes. You know – most of them? My friend and then co-worker Greg Myers wrote several articles in a series called Demolition Derby that you can still find on the Internet Wayback Machine.
It’s curious that in 2027, an enterprise software company plans to ship a product that includes an open-source component officially retired in 2025 and largely unchanged since 2018. This is the same enterprise software company we were already questioning back in 2012. Not just for using Apache Derby. But for using it poorly in clustered environments.
I’ll give SAP a hat tip for some of the innovations in BI 2027. But it’s hard to ignore that one of those choices is Apache Derby, a database named after a hat style that feels stuck in another era.
To be fair, replacing Derby isn’t free. It takes planning, funding, and testing. But this isn’t a new problem. It is one that customers have been waiting to see solved for more than a decade. For years, the expectation has been that Derby would quietly disappear, whether replaced by another Java-based database like H2, HSQLDB, or its necessity absorbed into the CMS or Audit database.
The company that retired Desktop Intelligence, Adobe Flash, Data Federator, Java-based browser plug-ins, and the Universe Design Tool can absolutely do better than this.
And after nearly 15 years of maintenance payments since the Demolition Derby, its BusinessObjects customers should expect it.
Do you think SAP will finally retire Derby, or like Toy Story are we likely headed for a sixth installment? Let me know in the comments.
