Deprecate Derby support since Apache Derby is retired since 2023

[marschall]

From the Apache Derby project site

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.

The last Apache Derby release was on 14 November 2023. We should probably first deprecate and the remove Derby support. Maybe log a warning when Derby is detected.

A quick search shows the following affected code places:

• org.springframework.jdbc.core.metadata.DerbyCallMetaDataProvider
• org.springframework.jdbc.core.metadata.DerbyTableMetaDataProvider
• org.springframework.jdbc.core.metadata.CallMetaDataProviderFactory#DERBY
• org.springframework.jdbc.core.metadata.DerbyEmbeddedDatabaseConfigurer
• org.springframework.jdbc.core.metadata.TableMetaDataProviderFactory
• org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.embedded.EmbeddedDatabaseConfigurers
• org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.embedded.EmbeddedDatabaseType
• org.springframework.jdbc.core.StatementCreatorUtils
• org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.Database#Derby

I can work an a PR if there is agreement.

[jhoeller]

Good point, let's mark all of our Derby support as deprecated in 7.1 (@Deprecated(forRemoval = true) right away) and then remove it in 7.2. I expect Boot to follow in 4.2 and 4.4, respectively.

Please note that we don't have a 7.1-targeting branch yet, and no intentions to create it before February. Since we'll actually create a 7.0.x maintenance branch, dedicating main to 7.1 then, feel free to nevertheless create a PR against main; we just won't be able to merge it right away.