> Does writing the schema cause any locking in spiceDB? It takes a DB transaction to ensure that the changes won't impact any existing data, but it doesn't block other queries > Does performance of writing relationships and checking permissions possibly decrease when a new schema is being written? It can, but again, only because a transaction is open where it is checking for the existance of relationships > If so, are there any short-circuits for this if the new schema happens to be the same as the existing one? Yes, it will no-op > I want to know if I can write the schema on every deployment of our app, regardless of whether there are changes or not. But I won't want the performance of checks to degrade during the schema deployment. You can, yes and so long as there are no changes, it should do nothing. However, we'd still recommend using the new DiffSchema API to check if there are changes