Managing roles
Roles can be managed by means of three main SQL statements: CREATE ROLE to create a role from scratch, ALTER ROLE to change some role properties (for example, the login password), and DROP ROLE to remove an existing role.
PostgreSQL ships with operating system tools to manage roles: createuser and dropuser. Both these commands open a connection to the cluster and perform the SQL commands mentioned above; therefore, the usage of these tools will not be explained in this chapter.
In order to use the SQL statements to create new roles and then manage them, it is necessary to connect to a database in the cluster. The superuser role postgres can be used to that aim, at least initially, since such a role is created when the database cluster is initialized. Using the postgres role and a template database is the most common way to create your initial roles.
A role is identified by a string that represents the role name, or better, the account name of...
