The number of cloud-based Java database applications grows by the minute. Many organizations deploy hundreds — if not thousands — of microservice instances. However, most applications carry an astounding amount of unnecessary overhead with respect to the runtime environment. This, in turn, makes the application slower and more expensive to run.
In this article, I will demonstrate how to write a database application that is 10 times smaller than normal(*). The storage requirement will be about 32 MB instead of the usual(*) ~300 MB taking both the application, third-party libraries, and the Java runtime into account. As a bonus, the required RAM to run the application will also be reduced by 25 percent.