ALTER_GROUP - change role name or membership
Contents
Compatibility
There is no ALTERGROUP statement in the SQL standard.
Description
ALTERGROUP changes the attributes of a user group. This is an obsolete command, though still accepted
for backwards compatibility, because groups (and users too) have been superseded by the more general
concept of roles.
The first two variants add users to a group or remove them from a group. (Any role can play the part of
either a “user” or a “group” for this purpose.) These variants are effectively equivalent to granting or
revoking membership in the role named as the “group”; so the preferred way to do this is to use GRANT or
REVOKE. Note that GRANT and REVOKE have additional options which are not available with this command,
such as the ability to grant and revoke ADMIN OPTION, and the ability to specify the grantor.
The third variant changes the name of the group. This is exactly equivalent to renaming the role with
ALTERROLE.
Examples
Add users to a group:
ALTER GROUP staff ADD USER karl, john;
Remove a user from a group:
ALTER GROUP workers DROP USER beth;
Name
ALTER_GROUP - change role name or membership
Parameters
group_name
The name of the group (role) to modify.
user_name
Users (roles) that are to be added to or removed from the group. The users must already exist; ALTERGROUP does not create or drop users.
new_name
The new name of the group.
See Also
GRANT(7), REVOKE(7), ALTER ROLE (ALTER_ROLE(7))
PostgreSQL 17.5 2025 ALTERGROUP(7)
Synopsis
ALTER GROUP role_specification ADD USER user_name [, ... ]
ALTER GROUP role_specification DROP USER user_name [, ... ]
where role_specification can be:
role_name
| CURRENT_ROLE
| CURRENT_USER
| SESSION_USER
ALTER GROUP group_name RENAME TO new_name
