How to add admin user to existing postgres database?

Question

We have an existing postgres database gsrdb in production with superuser gsr . We have been doing all the database maintenance with that user gsr . Also, the same user gsr is used by our app service to do transactions on the database.

We want to change this now. We want a separate superuser gsr_admin (whose credentials are managed by Vault) that can do the dba maintenance but still have our app service use existing user gsr .

The problem I am facing is that all the database objects so far are owned by gsr user and if I run updates, as user gsr_admin , on the database wrt either table constraints or sequences it fails saying error: must be owner of relation...blah blah

How can I fix this?

So I was thinking if I could create a superuser admin group role called admin_group and reassign all the ownerships of all the database objects to it from user gsr and then alter both users gsr and gsr_admin to belong to this admin group role. Wouldn't that way everything that has been created so far would be owned by role admin_group ? And whether I create new objects as a user gsr or as gsr_admin either of them can still update the objects?

I might be wrong. Would really appreciate some inputs.

Answer 1

Simply run

ALTER ROLE gsr NOSUPERUSER;
ALTER ROLE gsr RENAME TO gsr_admin;  -- needs a new password now
CREATE ROLE gsr LOGIN;
GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA myschema TO gsr;
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE
   ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA myschema TO gsr;

Similarly, grant USAGE on sequences and other required privileges. You may want to run some ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES for future objects as well.