I'm in charge of developing and maintaining a group of Web Applications that are centered around similar data. The architecture I decided on at the time was that each application would have their own database and web-root application. Each application maintains a connection pool to its own database and a central database for shared data (logins, etc.)

A co-worker has been positing that this strategy will not scale because having so many different connection pools will not be scalable and that we should refactor the database so that all of the different applications use a single central database and that any modifications that may be unique to a system will need to be reflected from that one database and then use a single pool powered by Tomcat. He has posited that there is a lot of "meta data" that goes back and forth across the network to maintain a connection pool.

My understanding is that with proper tuning to use only as many connections as necessary across the different pools (low volume apps getting less connections, high volume apps getting more, etc.) that the number of pools doesn't matter compared to the number of connections or more formally that the difference in overhead required to maintain 3 pools of 10 connections is negligible compared to 1 pool of 30 connections.

The reasoning behind initially breaking the systems into a one-app-one-database design was that there are likely going to be differences between the apps and that each system could make modifications on the schema as needed. Similarly, it eliminated the possibility of system data bleeding through to other apps.

Unfortunately there is not strong leadership in the company to make a hard decision. Although my co-worker is backing up his worries only with vagueness, I want to make sure I understand the ramifications of multiple small databases/connections versus one large database/connection pool.