Postgresql – GRANT USAGE on all schemas in a database

amazon-rdspostgresqlpostgresql-9.3

I want to GRANT USAGE to a user/role for a given database. The database has many schemas.

I know there's an ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA, but I want "all schemas". I tried GRANT USAGE .. ON DATABASE, but that's obviously wrong (it doesn't actually exist).

This is for Postgres 9.3 or 9.4, it happens to be a server that is on AWS RDS.

Best Answer

You have at least two options.

The first one makes use of a small query and a text editor. We have to collect the schemata of our interest:

SELECT nspname
  FROM pg_namespace;

You can add a WHERE clause if you want to limit the scope. Copy the output and amend it, so you get a number of GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA ... TO your_role; commands. Then just feed it to psql, for example:

psql -f multigrant.sql

A usual variant of this could be a shell script that loops over the collected names and calls psql, passing the constructed GRANT statement to the -c option.

The other solution does basically the same in one pl/pgsql block, building a dynamic query. The core is the same - we have to collect the schemata. Then we loop over all of them, granting the permissions schema by schema:

DO $do$
DECLARE
    sch text;
BEGIN
    FOR sch IN SELECT nspname FROM pg_namespace
    LOOP
        EXECUTE format($$ GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA %I TO your_role $$, sch);
    END LOOP;
END;
$do$;

Notes:

  • unlike for tables, sequences, functions and types, one cannot set default privileges for schemata (as of 9.4). You will have to grant this privilege for any newly added schema manually.
  • here I am using dollar quoting when building the dynamic query. This allows me to use 'normal' syntax, as opposed to multiplicating single quotes, for example (not present in this example). This way most editors will highlight the statements nicely.
  • I also use format() with the %I format specifier to have the object name properly quoted if necessary. This approach is far more readable than building the query with concatenation of string constants and some quote_ident() calls.
  • pg_namespace can be found in the pg_catalog schema. Check out the other objects in there - they store every aspect of your schemas, tables and so on.
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