In accordance with an embodiment, described herein is a system and method for high availability and load balancing in a database environment. A transparency engine can be provided between client applications and a database, and can operate as a proxy engine for the database and as a session abstraction layer for the client applications, to enable the client applications to utilize database features provided by the connection pool without code changes to the client applications. The transparency can keep track of session states, request boundaries and cursors to efficiently reuse the database connections across the client applications. The transparency engine can use the request boundaries and indicators from the database to detect safe places to drain database connections in the event of database outages.