PostgreSQL 11 Administration Cookbook

Giving limited superuser powers to specific users

The superuser role has some privileges that can also be granted to non-superuser roles separately.

To give the bob role the ability to create new databases, run this:

ALTER ROLE BOB WITH CREATEDB;

To give the bob role the ability to create new users, run the following:

ALTER ROLE BOB WITH CREATEROLE;

It is also possible to give ordinary users more fine-grained and controlled access to an action reserved for superusers using security definer functions. The same trick can also be used to pass partial privileges between different users.