Prior to “try-with-resources” (before Java 7) while dealing with SQL Statement or ResultSet or Connection objects or other IO objects one had to explicitly close the resource. So one would write something like-
try{ //Create a resource- R }catch(SomeException e){ //Hanlde the exception }finally{ //if resource R is not null then try{ //close the resource } catch(SomeOtherException ex){ } }