Re: How different is AWS-RDS postgres?

That sure looks like something is causing your connection to have a transaction rollback.  I haven't worked in Java in far too long, but it seems like your connection pool is under the impression your connection was abandoned so it reclaims it and rollback the transaction, which would explain why you aren't seeing the table when all is said and done - all of the work is being undone at the end.

One possibility, based on the catalina log you provided - if you have either end of the connection set up to automatically close idle connections after a period of time, then you might receive a closed connection from the pool, which will just error out when you attempt to run a query. In which case, you need to set up your connection pool to test a connection before it returns it to the requester.  Usually something as simple as "select 2" will be sufficient to determine if the database connection is open. I can just about guarantee that your connection pool has a parameter which allows you to specify a query to execute when a connection is requested. 

      contextResource.setProperty("validationQuery",                    "SELECT 1");