DBADMIN Role

Every database has the special DBADMIN role. A superuser (or someone with the PSEUDOSUPERUSER Role) can grant this role to or revoke this role from any user or role.

Users who enable the DBADMIN role gain these privileges:

• Create or drop users
• Create or drop schemas
• Create or drop roles
• Grant roles to other users
• View all system tables
• View and terminate user sessions
• Access to all data created by any user

The DBADMIN role does NOT allow users to:

• Start and stop a database
• Set configuration parameters

You cannot assign additional roles to the DBADMIN role:

=> CREATE ROLE appviewer;
CREATE ROLE
=> GRANT appviewer TO dbadmin;
ROLLBACK 2347:  Cannot alter predefined role "dbadmin"

You can, however, grant the DBADMIN role to other roles to augment a set of privileges. See Role Hierarchy for more information.

View a List of Database Superusers

To see who is a superuser, run the vsql \du command. In this example, only dbadmin is a superuser.

=> \du      
     List of users
 User name | Is Superuser
-----------+--------------
 dbadmin   | t
 Fred      | f
 Bob       | f
 Sue       | f
 Alice     | f
 User1     | f
 User2     | f
 User3     | f
 u1        | f
 u2        | f
(10 rows)