ORA-03114 in oracleconnection

Hi,
I have a small application that uses the concept of conenction pooling.
I store all my connections in a hasmap and everything works fine.

Now when the application is still running and the hashmap holds oracle conenction; and then if the oracle database is used, it thorws and ORA-03114 error when any of the conenctions in the pool is used to fire a query.

I am using Oracle 8.1.7.

How do I solve this without restarting the applciation.
I cannot use isClose(); since this method can be used only when a connection.close() is cloased. In this case, this does not happen.

Is there a way to find out that the database is restarted or the connection in th pool that I ma using is no more valid.

Thanks
Regards
Jasmina

re-make your hashmap inside your catch clause. how it sounds??
anyway dont know if DB shuts down the connections become invalid. if it is like that thanks for pointing out. never came across this.