Comment 8 for bug 1806784

sqlalchemy docs for reference on "SELECT 1":

http://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/latest/core/pooling.html#disconnect-handling-pessimistic
"Dealing with Disconnects
The connection pool has the ability to refresh individual connections as well as its entire set of connections, setting the previously pooled connections as “invalid”. A common use case is allow the connection pool to gracefully recover when the database server has been restarted, and all previously established connections are no longer functional. There are two approaches to this.

Disconnect Handling - Pessimistic
The pessimistic approach refers to emitting a test statement on the SQL connection at the start of each connection pool checkout, to test that the database connection is still viable. Typically, this is a simple statement like “SELECT 1”, but may also make use of some DBAPI-specific method to test the connection for liveness."