By writing your own class that fulfills some minimal requirements, you can hook up to an external authentication service other than LDAP. To do so, specify an external authentication service by setting the property derby.authentication.provider to a class name that you want to load at startup.

The class that provides the external authentication service must implement the public interface org.apache.derby.authentication.UserAuthenticator and throw exceptions of the type java.sql.SQLException where appropriate.

Using a user-defined class makes adaptable to various naming and directory services.