ArcPy needs the ability to connect, disconnect and check the status of a connection to a database. When connecting to an enterprise database feature class behind the scenes ArcPy creates a connection, opens it and retrieves the data. If, for some reason, ArcPy gets disconnected from the database there is no way to reconnect or even disconnect. Even using del(arcpy) will not drop the failed connection. The only way is to completely exit out of python and start over. Every other database client library in the universe has the ability to connect, disconnect and check the status of the connection. ArcPy needs this too. In our experience long running ArcPy sessions often become disconnected from the database server (another bug...) and it is impossible to recover from this programatically from within Python and ArcPy.
