Practical GIS

Securing our database

So far, we used the public schema with the postgres role to create and fill our database. These are the default values, which are great for creating a local database, but far from ideal if we would like to create a remote GIS server. Let's discuss how roles and schemas work in PostgreSQL.

Roles are basically users that can log in, and do some stuff based on their permissions. Different roles can have different access levels to different databases. There are two kinds of roles--login roles and no-login roles (group roles). Group roles act as groups in operating systems; therefore, they can group multiple login roles, and manage their permissions in one place. Login roles are the typical users with passwords. The catch ...