Downtime issue troubleshooting

A site I've been building has been showing me the "trouble connecting to the database" error page on a fairly regular basis. I have also been running an uptime monitor on the site, pinging once per minute, and am finding the site frequently down. Though these downtimes are only momentary and go away with a simple refresh. I was convinced that this is a hosting issue, but my client thinks otherwise and wants me to try "changing the database scheme name". I'm not clear what he is suggesting. can anyone provide some guidance here?