Bruce Morrison on Errors can be misleading…
Bruce has a great post over on his Stuff and Nonsense blog about eZ Publish not displaying database connection errors but instead responding with an access denied message.
I think I would prefer to see eZ Publish resort back to an “Oops” or “Our site is under maintenance” display in the case of failed database connections, in preference to seeing either a no database error or access denied, both of which have negative impacts on visitors.
As a point of interest the admin design does display Error 50: No Database Connection on the login screen when a database connection is not present.