Connection pooling is a technique of creating and managing a pool of connections that are ready for use by any thread that needs them. This technique of “pooling” connections is based on the fact that most applications only need a thread to have access to a JDBC connection when they are actively processing a transaction, which usually take only milliseconds to complete. When not processing a transaction, the connection would otherwise sit idle. Instead, connection pooling allows the idle connection to be used by some other thread to do useful work more on: http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/connection_pooling_with_con...
