I've been using insert, update and select cursors found in arcpy.da and so far it's met my needs.
Today, I found another situation where I really just want to throw a SQL statement at the database, from my python/arcpy code, and get the resultset. Specifically, I want to get the Id of a polygon that contains a point; very easy to do with a SQL statement in my SQL tool.
There have been other examples over the last few weeks so this question is not about how do perform the point / polygon intersection. It's about running SQL statements from within my ArcPy code. In other parts of my code, ArcPy uses ArcSDE connection files to access the ArcSDE feature classes and it would be great if I could use the existing data access infrastructure and just send a SQL statement.