This thread is old, but maybe this will help someone. I couldn't get this function to work. It kept returning True instead of rows. From the help doc we know what a Boolean return means. This isn't particularly helpful if you know a stored procedure returns rows. But at least it is something.
....for statements that do not return rows,
it will return an indication of the success or failure of the statement
(True for success; None for failure).
When i turned to pandas as an alternative I received a similar error message from sqlalchemy:
File "C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Pro\bin\Python\envs\arcgispro-py3\lib\site-packages\sqlalchemy\engine\result.py", line 1077, in _non_result
"This result object does not return rows. "
sqlalchemy.exc.ResourceClosedError: This result object does not return rows. It has been closed automatically.
This led me to a stackoverflow comment that suggested using SET NO COUNT when working with stored procedures and sqlalchemy. I wondered if this might work with ArcSDESQLExecute. It didn't. But, it solved my problem with pandas. Here is an example if you want the result of a stored procedure and have hit a wall with this function.
import urllib
import sqlalchemy as sa
import pandas as pd
sqlStatement = "SET NOCOUNT ON EXEC dbo.spPropCharaSelectByNBHD 312524"
params = urllib.parse.quote_plus("DSN={yourDSNnameHERE};Trusted_Connection=yes")
engine = sa.create_engine("mssql+pyodbc:///?odbc_connect=%s" % params)
current_source = pd.read_sql_query(sqlStatement,engine)
