I don’t think that it is just the dialect that will attempt to connect to the database. There are other metadata that are extracted through JDBC, so if you want to make sure that no JDBC connection is established, you will have to use the config setting that I suggested. Since there is no way to query JDBC driver information without a connection, there are quite a few optimizations that you might possibly be missing out on though, so maybe consider some sort of build where you have a test instance available or don’t trigger this eager deployment and instead deploy that container to a staging environment for catching startup errors.