I have a few functions that do some database stuff. Of course I want to run them async, how should I do it? Add the suspend keyword to the function and then call the functions with an async block?

Please, join #coroutines for discussion. Assuming that you don’t have access to async DB driver (your DB invocations block at thread) you can consider this kind of solution: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.coroutines/blob/master/ui/coroutines-guide-ui.md#blocking-operations