When building sql statements that will be executed against different databases it's helpful to know which functions/operators are appropriate for the underlying rdbms. In ArcObjects this was accomplished via. the ISQLSyntax interface. From that interface you could get things like the wildcard character for the underlying rdbms or the name of the function to use to convert a string to uppercase (and a bunch of other helpful tidbits). There doesn't seem to be an equivalent functionality exposed on the workspace description object in arcpy and having that would be quite useful.
FYI - https://developers.arcgis.com/enterprise-sdk/api-reference/net/ISQLSyntax/
