Currently whenever we start a new C* session in the database plugin, we
run `LIST ALL` to determine whether we are a superuser, or otherwise
have permissions on roles. This is a fairly sensible way of checking
this, except it can be really slow when you have a lot of roles (C*
isn't so good at listing things). It's also really intensive to C* and
leads to a lot of data transfer. We've seen timeout issues when doing
this query, and can of course raise the timeout, but we'd probably
prefer to be able to switch it off.