Running Spring without a MySQL database

Hello everyone, I'm writing here for the first time.

I'm doing a lab at uni and need to make a Spring project that implements the Proxy pattern.

If the database is working, then everything is great, you can load data from it. If not, then the data should be loaded from an xml file. I think I've implemented the Proxy, but I can't run Spring without MySQL, I've read all of StackOverflow and various sources, but nothing helps.

How can I do it?