When an object is created, it is assigned an owner. The owner is normally the role that executed the creation statement. For most kinds of objects, the initial state is that only the owner (or a superuser) can do anything with the object. To allow other roles to use it, privileges must be granted.

There are different kinds of privileges: SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, TRUNCATE, REFERENCES, TRIGGER, CREATE, CONNECT, TEMPORARY, EXECUTE, and USAGE. The privileges applicable to a particular object vary depending on the object's type (table, function, etc). More detail about the meanings of these privileges appears below. The following sections and chapters will also show you how these privileges are used.

The right to modify or destroy an object is always the privilege of the owner only.

An object can be assigned to a new owner with an ALTER command of the appropriate kind for the object, for example

ALTER TABLE table_name OWNER TO new_owner;

Superusers can always do this; ordinary roles can only do it if they are both the current owner of the object (or a member of the owning role) and a member of the new owning role.

To assign privileges, the GRANT command is used. For example, if joe is an existing role, and accounts is an existing table, the privilege to update the table can be granted with:

GRANT UPDATE ON accounts TO joe;

Writing ALL in place of a specific privilege grants all privileges that are relevant for the object type.

The special “role” name PUBLIC can be used to grant a privilege to every role on the system. Also, “group” roles can be set up to help manage privileges when there are many users of a database — for details see Chapter 21.

To revoke a privilege, use the fittingly named REVOKE command:

REVOKE ALL ON accounts FROM PUBLIC;

The special privileges of the object owner (i.e., the right to do DROP, GRANT, REVOKE, etc.) are always implicit in being the owner, and cannot be granted or revoked. But the object owner can choose to revoke their own ordinary privileges, for example to make a table read-only for themselves as well as others.

Ordinarily, only the object's owner (or a superuser) can grant or revoke privileges on an object. However, it is possible to grant a privilege “with grant option”, which gives the recipient the right to grant it in turn to others. If the grant option is subsequently revoked then all who received the privilege from that recipient (directly or through a chain of grants) will lose the privilege. For details see the GRANT and REVOKE reference pages.

The available privileges are:

The privileges required by other commands are listed on the reference page of the respective command.

PostgreSQL grants privileges on some types of objects to PUBLIC by default when the objects are created. No privileges are granted to PUBLIC by default on tables, table columns, sequences, foreign data wrappers, foreign servers, large objects, schemas, or tablespaces. For other types of objects, the default privileges granted to PUBLIC are as follows: CONNECT and TEMPORARY (create temporary tables) privileges for databases; EXECUTE privilege for functions and procedures; and USAGE privilege for languages and data types (including domains). The object owner can, of course, REVOKE both default and expressly granted privileges. (For maximum security, issue the REVOKE in the same transaction that creates the object; then there is no window in which another user can use the object.) Also, these default privilege settings can be overridden using the ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES command.

Table 5.1 shows the one-letter abbreviations that are used for these privilege types in ACL (Access Control List) values. You will see these letters in the output of the psql commands listed below, or when looking at ACL columns of system catalogs.

Table 5.2 summarizes the privileges available for each type of SQL object, using the abbreviations shown above. It also shows the psql command that can be used to examine privilege settings for each object type.

The privileges that have been granted for a particular object are displayed as a list of aclitem entries, each having the format:

grantee=privilege-abbreviation[*].../grantor

Each aclitem lists all the permissions of one grantee that have been granted by a particular grantor. Specific privileges are represented by one-letter abbreviations from Table 5.1, with * appended if the privilege was granted with grant option. For example, calvin=r*w/hobbes specifies that the role calvin has the privilege SELECT (r) with grant option (*) as well as the non-grantable privilege UPDATE (w), both granted by the role hobbes. If calvin also has some privileges on the same object granted by a different grantor, those would appear as a separate aclitem entry. An empty grantee field in an aclitem stands for PUBLIC.

As an example, suppose that user miriam creates table mytable and does:

GRANT SELECT ON mytable TO PUBLIC;
GRANT SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT ON mytable TO admin;
GRANT SELECT (col1), UPDATE (col1) ON mytable TO miriam_rw;

Then psql's \dp command would show:

=> \dp mytable
                                  Access privileges
 Schema |  Name   | Type  |   Access privileges   |   Column privileges   | Policies
--------+---------+-------+-----------------------+-----------------------+----------
 public | mytable | table | miriam=arwdDxt/miriam+| col1:                +|
        |         |       | =r/miriam            +|   miriam_rw=rw/miriam |
        |         |       | admin=arw/miriam      |                       |
(1 row)

If the “Access privileges” column is empty for a given object, it means the object has default privileges (that is, its privileges entry in the relevant system catalog is null). Default privileges always include all privileges for the owner, and can include some privileges for PUBLIC depending on the object type, as explained above. The first GRANT or REVOKE on an object will instantiate the default privileges (producing, for example, miriam=arwdDxt/miriam) and then modify them per the specified request. Similarly, entries are shown in “Column privileges” only for columns with nondefault privileges. (Note: for this purpose, “default privileges” always means the built-in default privileges for the object's type. An object whose privileges have been affected by an ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES command will always be shown with an explicit privilege entry that includes the effects of the ALTER.)

Notice that the owner's implicit grant options are not marked in the access privileges display. A * will appear only when grant options have been explicitly granted to someone.