Roles are a powerful tool to represent both single users and a group of users. When a database connection attempt is made, PostgreSQL processes the connection credential information through the host-based access control so that it can immediately establish or reject the connection depending on firewall-like rules. Moreover, single users and groups can have other limitations to the number of connections they can open against a database or against the whole cluster.
In this chapter, you have seen how to create and manage roles, as well as how to allow single roles to connect to the cluster and to specific databases. In Chapter 10, Users, Roles, and Database Security, you will see how to deal with the security properties of users and groups, but before you proceed further, you need to know how PostgreSQL objects can be created and managed.
In the following chapter, you will learn how to interact with the PostgreSQL database using SQL statements.
