Trouble getting drizzle to run on server side in nextjs

Hi, having some trouble getting drizzle db connection to run on server side as documentation shows. i followed the steps multiple times and each time only leads to working if the environment variables are prefixed with NEXT_PUBLIC or hardcoded (node env variables not loading) and would have to be exposed to browser which i dont want to do. is there a reason its only running on client side calls? i have tried moving the files to different areas in my next project, including the server folder but no luck. the steps followed was from planetscale mysql instructions.