Described herein are systems and methods for providing access to a database in a multi-tenant environment, including the use of a connection pool, and support for live addition of a tenant. When a pluggable database (PDB), for use by a tenant, is added to a multi-tenant database, it can generate an event to notify the connection pool. The connection pool environment consumes this PDB-add event, and dynamically configures a new tenant to access the shared pool. Since the new tenant addition is based on receipt of an event from the database, the connection pool does not require manual configuration for that tenant. Once a tenant is added, it can borrow connections from the pool in the same manner as existing tenants, and can also share existing pool properties, such as, for example a maximum pool size, or maximum number of connections per tenant.