initialize

Initializes the database and caches enough information so that the non-blocking API functions (eg, get_experiment_branch()) can return accurate results rather than throwing a "not initialized" error. It's not strictly necessary to call this function - any function that wants to use the database will implicitly initialize too - this exists so that the consuming application can have confidence the non-blocking functions will return data instead of returning an error, and will do the minimum amount of work to achieve that.