You can find out the value of a system property if you set it programmatically. You cannot find out the value of a system property if you set it in the derby.properties file.

For example, if you set the value of the derby.storage.pageSize system-wide property in your program or on the command line, the following code will retrieve its value from the System Properties object: Properties sprops = System.getProperties(); System.out.println("derby.storage.pageSize value: " + sprops.getProperty("derby.storage.pageSize"));