Re: DROP ROLE as SUPERUSER

"David G. Johnston" <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Thursday, February 20, 2025, Dominique Devienne <ddevienne(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
>> Hi. Today I was surprised that REVOKE ALL ON DATABASE FROM ROLE silently
>> did nothing, even with CASCADE, when I was running it as SUPERUSER,
>> preventing DROP'ing the ROLE. I had to manually SET ROLE to the GRANTOR, do
>> the REVOKE, which DID something this time, and then I could DROP the role.

> This has nothing to do with power/permissions. It is about not specifying
> “granted by” in your SQL command and thus failing to fully and correctly
> specify the single permission you want to revoke.

It used to be that if a superuser issued GRANT/REVOKE, the operation
was silently done as the owner of the affected object. That was
always a bit of a wart, since among other things it meant that the
object owner could undo it. Now you have to say "GRANTED BY <owner>"
to get that effect. I'm not entirely sure, but I think this is closer
to what the SQL standard says.

regards, tom lane