What is transaction pooling anyway? A transaction exists for a specific action, it shouldn't be shared among users or multiple connections. It sounds like they've taken transactions and removed the isolation.

I don't know what the data access is like, but I get the impression that it's like some "enterprise" patterns I've seen where data access is too "encapsulated", ie, each DAL opens it's own connection, pulls it's chunk of data and each request involves many of these instead of having each request open the connection and pass it down to the data access layers.