What are the benefits of Connection pooling?

Using connection pools helps to both alleviate connection management overhead and decrease development tasks for data access.

Each time an application attempts to access a backend store (such as a database), it requires resources to create, maintain, and release a connection to that datastore. To mitigate the strain this process can place on overall application resources, the Application Server enables administrators to establish a pool of backend connections that applications can share on an application server. Connection pooling spreads the connection overhead across several user requests, thereby conserving application resources for future requests.

The Application Server supports JDBC 3.0 APIs for connection pooling and connection reuse. The connection pool is used to direct JDBC calls within the application, as well as for enterprise beans using the database.