ODBC connection pooling is a method of sharing active database connections with similar or identical connection characteristics. When a connection is released through a call to SQLDisconnect(), the connection is left open and added to a pool of active connections.

When an ODBC application opens a new connection, the application searches the pool for a connection with matching connection characteristics. If a match is found, the connection from the pool is used "under the covers" instead of creating a new connection. If a match is not found, a new connection is opened.

ODBC connection pooling can improve performance significantly because an ODBC application can take a long time to connect relative to the time it takes to process data.

ODBC pooled connections can be shared with single or multi-threaded ODBC applications, but are not shared between separate ODBC applications.