1. Create roles

Create a role with a password. You can do this with the CREATE ROLE statement.

As an example, let us create a role engineering for an engineering team in an organization.

yugabyte=# CREATE ROLE engineering;

Roles that have LOGIN privileges are users. As an example, you can create a user john as follows:

yugabyte=# CREATE ROLE john LOGIN PASSWORD 'PasswdForJohn';

Read about how to create users in YugabyteDB in the Authentication section.

2. Grant roles

You can grant a role to another role (which can be a user), or revoke a role that has already been granted. Executing the GRANT and the REVOKE operations requires the AUTHORIZE privilege on the role being granted or revoked.

As an example, you can grant the engineering role you created above to the user john as follows:

yugabyte=# GRANT engineering TO john;

Read more about granting roles.

3. Create a hierarchy of roles, if needed

In YSQL, you can create a hierarchy of roles. The privileges of any role in the hierarchy flows downward.

As an example, let us say that in the above example, you want to create a developer role that inherits all the privileges from the engineering role. You can achieve this as follows.

First, create the developer role.

yugabyte=# CREATE ROLE developer;

Next, GRANT the engineering role to the developer role.

yugabyte=# GRANT engineering TO developer;

4. List roles

You can list all the roles by running the following statement:

yugabyte=# SELECT rolname, rolcanlogin, rolsuper, memberof FROM pg_roles;

You should see the following output:

 rolname     | rolcanlogin | rolsuper | memberof
-------------+-------------+----------+-----------------
 john        | t           | f        | {engineering}
 developer   | f           | f        | {engineering}
 engineering | f           | f        | {}
 yugabyte    | t           | t        | {}

(4 rows)

In the table above, note the following:

  • The yugabyte role is the built-in superuser.
  • The role john can log in, and hence is a user. Note that john is not a superuser.
  • The roles engineering and developer cannot log in.
  • Both john and developer inherit the role engineering.

5. Revoke roles

Roles can be revoked using the REVOKE statement.

In the above example, you can revoke the engineering role from the user john as follows:

yugabyte=# REVOKE engineering FROM john;

Listing all the roles now shows that john no longer inherits from the engineering role:

yugabyte=# SELECT rolname, rolcanlogin, rolsuperuser, memberof FROM pg_roles;

 rolname     | rolcanlogin | rolsuper | memberof
-------------+-------------+----------+-----------------
john         | t           | f        | {}
developer    | f           | f        | {engineering}
engineering  | f           | f        | {}
yugabyte     | t           | t        | {}

(4 rows)

6. Drop roles

Roles can be dropped with the DROP ROLE statement.

In the above example, you can drop the developer role with the following statement:

yugabyte=# DROP ROLE developer;

The developer role would no longer be present upon listing all the roles:

yugabyte=# SELECT rolname, rolcanlogin, rolsuper, memberof FROM pg_roles;

 rolname     | rolcanlogin | rolsuper | memberof
-------------+-------------+----------+-----------
 john        | t           | f        | {}
 engineering | f           | f        | {}
 yugabyte    | t           | t        | {}

(3 rows)