SpiceDB is a distributed permission store and relationship-based access control system. It provides a scalable database for storing and querying fine-grained authorization relationships, implementing a consistency model inspired by Google Zanzibar to manage access rights across large-scale applications.
The system uses a dedicated schema language to define the rules and logic governing how relationships translate into permissions independently of application code. It functions as a pluggable authorization engine that persists relationship tuples in external relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Spanner.
The platform covers a broad range of capabilities including authorization schema management, recursive permission evaluation, and the ability to query access data via SQL. It includes infrastructure for managing data lifecycles through relationship expiration and garbage collection, as well as performance optimizations using set theory for query planning and read-replica request routing.
The project can be deployed via containers and supports telemetry export for observability.