Dedicated database connections for schema migration

[pdeaudney]

Problem Statement

I want to be able to operate spicedb with database statement timeouts enforced to a value sensible for my environment that prevent unbounded data store query execution times.

In environments where I might have reverse proxies on the request path, these could have proxy request timeouts set to values that would terminate connections after X seconds.

Letting the spicedb datastore execute queries that run longer than this value presents an operational risk.

Particularly if the end user / system was to trigger multiple queries that result in the proxy cancelling/terminating the request but spicedb is left executing the long running queries until execution.

This is likely to lead to significant performance degradation on the spicedb datastore layer.

Solution Brainstorm

If SpiceDB had a optional connection string that is used for database migrations I would be able to enable unbound query execution times for that role that role/connection to ensure datastore migrations can complete (such as index creation changes).

This would allow me as a spicedb operator to enable default role/connection level parameters on my datastore for regular operation that prevent unbounded query execution times.