Roles

Not every database-backed application needs to be locked down like Fort Knox. Sometimes there are even roles that leverage blanket access to large swathes of available data, if not every table, simply for auditing or monitoring purposes. Normally this would require quite a bit of preparation or ongoing privilege management, but Postgres came up with a unique solution starting with version 14: predefined roles. This topic comes up relatively frequently in Postgres chats like Discord, Slack, and IRC.

Have you ever wanted to use a non-superuser role in a Postgres database to perform actions that are normally restricted? Even something as simple as reading from the pg_stat_activity view requires special permissions to view the query column because it could contain sensitive information.