I'd like to see if there's a good pattern for sharing a context across all classes and subthreads of a top-level thread without using `InheritableThreadLocal`.

I've got several top-level processes that each run in their own thread. These top-level processes often spawn temporary subthreads.

I want each top level process to have and manage it's own database connection.

I do *not* want to pass around the database connection from class to class and from thread to subthread (my associate calls this the "community bicycle" pattern). These are big top-level processes and it would mean editing probably hundreds of method signatures to pass around this database connection. 

Right now I call a singleton to get the database connection manager. The singleton uses `InheritableThreadLocal` so that each top-level process has it's own version of it. While I know some people have problems with singletons, it means I can just say `DBConnector.getDBConnection(args)` (to paraphrase) whenever I need the correctly managed connection. I am not tied to this method if I can find a better and yet still-clean solution.

For various reasons `InheritableThreadLocal` is proving to be tricky. (See [this question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9012371/using-inheritablethreadlocal-with-threadpoolexecutor-or-a-threadpoolexecut).)

Does anyone have a suggestion to handle this kind of thing that doesn't require either `InheritableThreadLocal` or passing around some context object all over the place?

Thanks for any help!

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Update: I've managed to solve the immediate problem (see the linked question) but I'd still like to hear about other possible approaches. forty-two's suggestion below is good and does work (thanks!), but see the comments for why it's problematic. If people vote for jtahlborn's answer and tell me that I'm being obsessive for wanting to avoid passing around my database connection then I will relent, select that as my answer, and revise my world-view.