Re: In MySQL 8, how do you distinguish between Roles and Users in table mysql.user?

[Georgi Kodinov]

Hi,

The MySQL refman says (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/roles.html):

> As has been hinted at earlier for SHOW GRANTS, which displays grants for user accounts or roles, accounts and roles can be used interchangeably. You can treat a user account like a role and grant that account to another user or a role. The effect is to grant the account's privileges and roles to the other user or role.

What does this mean in practice ?

That the distinction between a user account and a role is exactly where you want to put it.

You can take for example the footprint difference between CREATE ROLE (creates an authentication ID with no password and login disabled) vs CREATE USER (usually creates an authentication ID with login enabled).

You can also take the line to be between authentication ids that are granted to other authentication ids as roles and those that aren't.

It's entirely up to you. There's no artificial restrictions.

Georgi "Joro" Kodinov
MySQL SrvGen team lead
Plovdiv, Bulgaria