Creating and dropping roles

As a superuser with the DBADMIN or PSEUDOSUPERUSER role, you can create and drop roles with CREATE ROLE and DROP ROLE, respectively.

=> CREATE ROLE administrator;
CREATE ROLE

A new role has no privileges or roles granted to it. Only superusers can grant privileges and access to the role.

Dropping database roles with dependencies

If you try to drop a role that is granted to users or other roles the database returns a rollback message:

=> DROP ROLE administrator;
NOTICE:  User Bob depends on Role administrator
ROLLBACK:  DROP ROLE failed due to dependencies
DETAIL:  Cannot drop Role administrator because other objects depend on it
HINT:  Use DROP ROLE ... CASCADE to remove granted roles from the dependent users/roles

To force the drop operation, qualify the DROP ROLE statement with CASCADE:

=> DROP ROLE administrator CASCADE;
DROP ROLE