To prevent a memory leak, the JDBC Driver has been forcibly unregistered

To prevent this memory leak, simply deregister the driver on context shutdown.

pom.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>com.mywebsite</groupId>
    <artifactId>emusicstore</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>3.7.0</version>
                <configuration>
                    <source>1.9</source>
                    <target>1.9</target>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

    <dependencies>
        <!-- ... -->

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
            <artifactId>hibernate-core</artifactId>
            <version>4.0.1.Final</version>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.hibernate.javax.persistence</groupId>
            <artifactId>hibernate-jpa-2.0-api</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.1.Final</version>
        </dependency>

        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/mysql/mysql-connector-java -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>mysql</groupId>
            <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
            <version>8.0.11</version>
        </dependency>

        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/javax.servlet/servlet-api -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
            <artifactId>servlet-api</artifactId>
            <version>2.5</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

</project>

MyWebAppContextListener.java

package com.emusicstore.utils;

import com.mysql.cj.jdbc.AbandonedConnectionCleanupThread;

import javax.servlet.ServletContextEvent;
import javax.servlet.ServletContextListener;
import java.sql.Driver;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.SQLException;
import java.util.Enumeration;

public class MyWebAppContextListener implements ServletContextListener {

    @Override
    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent servletContextEvent) {
        System.out.println("************** Starting up! **************");
    }

    @Override
    public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent servletContextEvent) {
        System.out.println("************** Shutting down! **************");
        System.out.println("Destroying Context...");
        System.out.println("Calling MySQL AbandonedConnectionCleanupThread checkedShutdown");
        AbandonedConnectionCleanupThread.checkedShutdown();

        ClassLoader cl = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();

        Enumeration<Driver> drivers = DriverManager.getDrivers();
        while (drivers.hasMoreElements()) {
            Driver driver = drivers.nextElement();

            if (driver.getClass().getClassLoader() == cl) {
                try {
                    System.out.println("Deregistering JDBC driver {}");
                    DriverManager.deregisterDriver(driver);

                } catch (SQLException ex) {
                    System.out.println("Error deregistering JDBC driver {}");
                    ex.printStackTrace();
                }
            } else {
                System.out.println("Not deregistering JDBC driver {} as it does not belong to this webapp's ClassLoader");
            }
        }
    }

}

web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee
                             http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_4_0.xsd"
         version="4.0">

    <listener>
        <listener-class>com.emusicstore.utils.MyWebAppContextListener</listener-class>
    </listener>

<!-- ... -->

</web-app>

Source that inspired me for this bug fix.

This error happened to me in a Grails Application with the JTDS Driver 1.3.0 (SQL Server). The problem was an incorrect login in SQL Server. After solve this issue (in SQL Server) my app was correctly deployed in Tomcat. Tip: I saw the error in stacktrace.log