AWS RDS PostgreSQL access to pg_catalog.pg_authid forbidden in all contexts?

Question

PostgreSQL said: permission denied for relation pg_authid

Is pg_authid just unavailable on AWS RDS in all contexts because of RDS locking

Answer 1

The catalog pg_authid contains information about database authorization identifiers (roles). As you might be aware, that due to managed nature off RDS as a service, unfortunately it is not possible to have the full superuser role in RDS.

Unfortunately as the above mentioned is a limitation on RDS, if the access to 'pg_authid' is utmost necessary for performing your business, I would suggest you to look for EC2 hosted Postgres (community Postgres) as an option. The workaround to view the contents of 'pg_authid' is to use 'pg_roles', but the passwords are masked and would not tell you if it is encrypted or not.

Kindly note, not all catalogs are restricted from being read on RDS, below is the SQL Query which shows the privileges rds_superuser/master user has on each catalog.

SELECT relname, has_table_privilege('rds_superuser',relname,'SELECT') as SELECT,has_table_privilege('rds_superuser',relname,'UPDATE') as UPDATE,has_table_privilege('rds_superuser',relname,'INSERT') as INSERT,has_table_privilege('rds_superuser',relname,'TRUNCATE') as TRUNCATE FROM pg_class c , pg_namespace n where n.oid = c.relnamespace  and n.nspname in ('pg_catalog')  and relkind='r';