The ability to configure the datasource at the server level and have it shared amongst all applications on that server with each application supplying their own credentials for the datasource. This type of configuration is supported by DBCP and is called a "shared" datasource configuration.
Fix properties
Marking as an enhancement. Since the original developer of this module is not available at the moment, there is unlikely to be any progress on this for several months. A patch would certainly help progress things. I would also note that keeping jdbc-pool simple and not to fully implement every feature in DBCP was a deliberate design decision. Any patch should bear this in mind and should ideally provide this feature as an optional extra that does not add any overhead for users that do not wish to use it.
Jason, this ability does exist with the fix of https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50025 I'm working on a simple enhancement to Tomcat 7 that will allow this for any configured data source.
You can now do this with any configured data source as long as the data source itself supports getConnection(String,String) This was committed in http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=1055989
This feature was backported to Tomcat 6.0 in r1061511 and will be in 6.0.31.