Give all the permissions to a user on a DB

Question

I would like to give an user all the permissions on a database without making it an admin. The reason why I want to do that is that at the moment DEV and PROD are different DBs on the same cluster so I don't want a user to be able to change production objects but it must be able to change objects on DEV.

I tried:

grant ALL on database MY_DB to group MY_GROUP;

but it doesn't seem to give any permission.

Then I tried:

grant all privileges on schema MY_SCHEMA to group MY_GROUP;

and it seems to give me permission to create objects but not to query\delete objects on that schema that belong to other users

I could go on by giving USAGE permission to the user on MY_SCHEMA but then it would complain about not having permissions on the table ...

So I guess my question is: is there any easy way of giving all the permissions to a user on a DB?

I'm working on PostgreSQL 8.1.23.

Answer 1

The user needs access to the database, obviously:

GRANT CONNECT ON DATABASE my_db TO my_user;

And (at least) the USAGE privilege on the schema:

GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA public TO my_user;

Then, all permissions for all tables (requires Postgres 9.0 or later):

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO my_user;

And don't forget sequences (if any):

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public TO my_user;

For older versions you could use the "Grant Wizard" of pgAdmin III (the default GUI).

More:

• How to manage DEFAULT PRIVILEGES for USERs on a DATABASE vs SCHEMA?
• Grant privileges for a particular database in PostgreSQL
• How to grant all privileges on views to arbitrary user

But really, you should upgrade to a current version.

Answer 2

I did the following to add a role 'eSumit' on PostgreSQL 9.4.15 database and provide all permission to this role :

CREATE ROLE eSumit;

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO eSumit;

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE "postgres" to eSumit;

ALTER USER eSumit WITH SUPERUSER;

Also checked the pg_table enteries via :

select * from pg_roles;

Database queries snapshot :

Answer 3

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE "my_db" to my_user;

Answer 4

In PostgreSQL 9.0+ you would do the following:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA MY_SCHEMA TO MY_GROUP;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA MY_SCHEMA TO MY_GROUP;

If you want to enable this for newly created relations too, then set the default permissions:

ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES IN SCHEMA MY_SCHEMA
  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON TABLES TO MY_GROUP;
ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES IN SCHEMA MY_SCHEMA
  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON SEQUENCES TO MY_GROUP;

However, seeing that you use 8.1 you have to code it yourself:

CREATE FUNCTION grant_all_in_schema (schname name, grant_to name) RETURNS integer AS $$
DECLARE
  rel RECORD;
BEGIN
  FOR rel IN
    SELECT c.relname
    FROM pg_class c
    JOIN pg_namespace s ON c.namespace = s.oid
    WHERE s.nspname = schname
  LOOP
    EXECUTE 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ' || quote_ident(schname) || '.' || rel.relname || ' TO ' || quote_ident(grant_to);
  END LOOP;
  RETURN 1;
END; $$ LANGUAGE plpgsql STRICT;
REVOKE ALL ON FUNCTION grant_all_in_schema(name, name) FROM PUBLIC;

This will set the privileges on all relations: tables, views, indexes, sequences, etc. If you want to restrict that, filter on pg_class.relkind. See the pg_class docs for details.

You should run this function as superuser and as regular as your application requires. An option would be to package this in a cron job that executes every day or every hour.