How to set up an API-backed permanent store?

[Nick-Motion]

We're evaluating TanStack DB for a large application where we need to:

1. Fetch paginated data from an API (cursor based)
2. Store models in a normalized collection permanently (survive component unmounts)
3. Render filtered/sorted views over the accumulated data via useLiveQuery

After extensive testing and source code review, we've found that query collections cannot serve this use case due to three compounding issues:

1. Pagination is broken in on-demand mode (#820)

useLiveInfiniteQuery with syncMode: 'on-demand' doesn't implement cursor-based pagination. It appears to be designed only for moving a local window over a full dataset, rather than fetching pages on-demand.

The proposed pagination docs in #1355 (Approach 2, marked "Recommended") won't work because of this.

2. Row eviction on unsubscribe deletes permanent data (#1309)

When a component unmounts, subscription.unsubscribe() calls unloadSubset() for each loaded subset. The refcount in queryToRows/rowToQueries drops to 0, and cleanupQueryInternal deletes the rows from the collection via write({ type: 'delete' }).

gcTime does not prevent this — it only controls TanStack Query's cache lifetime, not the DB collection's row lifecycle.

3. Full State Sync prevents page accumulation

makeQueryResultHandler treats each queryFn result as complete state — items present in the old result but absent in the new result are deleted. This means anything written via writeInsert gets wiped on refetch of pages.

Questions:

1. Is there a planned path for "permanent collection" semantics — where rows survive unsubscribe and accumulate across paginated fetches?

2. What's the intended architecture for our use case? Using a Query Collection or Tanstack Query as the fetch/pagination layer and a separate local collection as the permanent store, and bridging them manually, creates a disconnect b/t the live query and the render - doesn't really work for making calls on-demand.

Versions:

    "@tanstack/db": "0.5.33",
    "@tanstack/query-db-collection": "1.0.30",
    "@tanstack/react-db": "0.1.77",