I think you could also accomplish the same thing with a goroutine. Just a struct that stores a RW mutex and a sql.DB connection that has a .Start() function th

I think you could also accomplish the same thing with a goroutine. Just a struct that stores a RW mutex and a sql.DB connection that has a .Start() function that runs the ping on a loop. On each start of the loop, lock the write mutex, run the ping, reconnect if it fails, and then release the mutex. Then just wrap each of the functions in sql.DB so that it gets a read lock before it executes the sql.DB function and defer the release. It's still a performance penalty, but it moves the round trip to a 99% latency situation instead of an every query situation.