Once #1131 is merged, we should go through and clean up instances in the codebase of:
conn_handler = SQLConnectionHandler() if conn_handler is None else conn_handler
And the variants. Either the conn_handler should be passed in, or a new object created. Since the database connections are not reopened on instantiation (unless necessary), the overhead of just doing SQLConnectionHandler() will be minor
cc @antgonza, who originally recommended opening this