Best Practices for Accessing a Database Through Java

I noted this down from a forum somewhere:

My personal opinion is that it is not the responsibility of a connection
pool to make up for application developer screw-ups. App developers can
make nearly all of this kind of problem go away if they would follow a
very simple design pattern:

DataSource ds = ...; // Acquire a reference to your connection pool
Connection conn = null;
Statement stmt = null;
ResultSet rs = null;
try {
  conn = ds.getConnection();
  ... use "conn" to do some database access stuff ...
  ... passing the "conn" instance to any subordinate methods ...
  ... that need access to this connection ...
} catch (SQLException e) {
   ... deal with database errors ...
} finally {
   if (conn != null) {
   try {
    conn.close(); // Return connection to the pool
    } catch (SQLException e) {
     ... report a really bad problem ...
   }
}

You can extend this to cleaning up open Statement and/or ResultSet objects