is there any way to do

Database.connect

without registering the database globally ? is there a alternative to the

ThreadLocalTransactionManager

?

Looking at the code it seems easy to avoid registering it globally. Why do you not want to use

ThreadLocalTransactionManager

?

because i do have a situation where the database user is based on the session (in ktor) and i do not want to accidentally use the threadlocal database in a transaction rather than the correct one i'd rather not have it registered in threadlocal and crash at that point

There is coroutine support for that: https://github.com/JetBrains/Exposed/wiki/Transactions#working-with-coroutines

thanks, i would probably not have found that