{"id":27606,"date":"2023-09-05T14:45:14","date_gmt":"2023-09-05T12:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/?p=27606"},"modified":"2023-09-05T14:45:16","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T12:45:16","slug":"create-user-create-role-what-should-be-used-in-postgresql","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/create-user-create-role-what-should-be-used-in-postgresql\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;create user&#8221;, &#8220;create role&#8221;, what should be used in PostgreSQL?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Recently we&#8217;ve seen a video on YouTube which recommends not to use the &#8220;create user&#8221; command in PostgreSQL and instead always use the &#8220;create role&#8221; command. It was also mentioned that &#8220;create group&#8221; should not be used as well. We&#8217;ve been a bit surprised by this and this is the reason for this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While we never use the &#8220;create group&#8221; command, there is nothing in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.postgresql.org\/docs\/current\/sql-creategroup.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">documentation<\/a> which recommends to avoid it. What is written there is, that &#8220;create group&#8221; is an alias for &#8220;create role&#8221;. This changed in version 8.1 of PostgreSQL and if you take a look at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.postgresql.org\/docs\/8.1\/release-8-1.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">release notes <\/a>you will find this: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;Create a new role system that replaces users and groups (Stephen Frost)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Roles are a combination of users and groups. Like users, they can have login capability, and like groups, a role can have other roles as members. Roles basically remove the distinction between users and groups. For example, a role can:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Have login capability (optionally)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Own objects<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Hold access permissions for database objects<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Inherit permissions from other roles it is a member of<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Once a user logs into a role, she obtains capabilities of the login role plus any inherited roles, and can use SET ROLE to switch to other roles she is a member of. This feature is a generalization of the SQL standard&#8217;s concept of roles. This change also replaces pg_shadow and pg_group by new role-capable catalogs pg_authid and pg_auth_members. The old tables are redefined as read-only views on the new role tables.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This means that the only concept from there on are roles, users and groups internally are gone. This also explains why &#8220;create group&#8221; and &#8220;create user&#8221; are aliases for &#8220;create role&#8221; since then. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is, however, no warning in the documentation to avoid those commands. Internally a role will be created, no matter which command you use. On the other hand we like to use &#8220;create user&#8221; when we want to create a role with login privileges, it is just easier to read. The only difference between &#8220;create role&#8221; and &#8220;create user&#8221; is, that &#8220;create user&#8221; grants the login privilege by default, while &#8220;create role&#8221; does not:<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-syntaxhighlighter-code \"><pre class=\"brush: sql; highlight: [1,3,8,10]; title: ; notranslate\" title=\"\">\npostgres=# create user u;\nCREATE ROLE\npostgres=# select rolcanlogin from pg_roles where rolname = &#039;u&#039;;\n rolcanlogin \n-------------\n t\n(1 row)\npostgres=# create role r;\nCREATE ROLE\npostgres=# select rolcanlogin from pg_roles where rolname = &#039;r&#039;;\n rolcanlogin \n-------------\n f\n(1 row)\n<\/pre><\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From a pure PostgreSQL internals point of view it might make sense to recommend not to use &#8220;create group&#8221; and &#8220;create user&#8221;. From an end user or DBA perspective these commands are still valid and if you want to use them, go ahead. If you want to only stick with &#8220;create role&#8221;, this is also fine. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently we&#8217;ve seen a video on YouTube which recommends not to use the &#8220;create user&#8221; command in PostgreSQL and instead always use the &#8220;create role&#8221; command. It was also mentioned that &#8220;create group&#8221; should not be used as well. We&#8217;ve been a bit surprised by this and this is the reason for this post. While [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[229,198],"tags":[77],"type_dbi":[],"class_list":["post-27606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-database-administration-monitoring","category-database-management","tag-postgresql"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.8 (Yoast SEO v28.8) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>&quot;create user&quot;, &quot;create role&quot;, what should be used in PostgreSQL? - dbi Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.dbi-services.com\/blog\/create-user-create-role-what-should-be-used-in-postgresql\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;create user&quot;, &quot;create role&quot;, what should be used in PostgreSQL?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Recently we&#8217;ve seen a video on YouTube which recommends not to use the &#8220;create user&#8221; command in PostgreSQL and instead always use the &#8220;create role&#8221; command. 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