Sharding and Connection Pools

Hi we are looking at sharding our existing Java/Oracle based application. We are looking to make the app servers able to process requests for multiple (any?) shard. The concern that has come up is the amount of memory that would be consumed by having so many connection pools on one app server. Additionally there is concern about having so many physical connections to the database server coming from all the various app servers that may talk to that particular shard. I was wondering if anyone else has dealt with this issue and how you resolved it?

Thanks,
Scott