Hi. I'd be happy to look at your code. There is pooling code in the
oracle driver, which *might* retain connections for re-use instead
of closing them when the app closes them, but I do not know when
this behavior would be invoked. The usual case I see is insufficient
thread-safety in servlets and JSPs etc, in that a given servlet is
typically a single instance, executed simultaneously by multiple
threads. Unless you define the JDBC connection as a method-level
object (ensuring each thread gets it's own connection), two threads
can be running, and each see the connection as null, each create
a new connection and assign it to the same variable, and the first
one to do so gets their connection reference overwritten and lost,
and the two threads share the connection set by the second.
   If you were to run your tomcat under a Java debugger, it would show
if there are any oracle connection objects collecting...

Joe Weinstein at BEA

It's Orrible's way of pushing you towards using the connection pool...
;)