Speed up specs from 30 minutes to 12 minutes

MSP-9121

Includes

MSP-9005

Instead of establishing a connection as needed for each access to the database, maintain a background connection for the entire suite as is done for rails specs.  This connection can be suspended by tagging the example group with `:without_established_connection`, which will remove the suite connection and re-establish it after all the examples in the group have run.