CREATE ROLE¶

Create a new role or replace an existing role in the system.

After creating roles, you can grant object privileges to the role and then grant the role to other roles or individual users to enable access control security for objects in the system.

This command supports the following variants:

CREATE OR ALTER ROLE: Creates a role if it doesn’t exist or alters an existing role.

CREATE OR ALTER <object>

Syntax¶

CREATE [ OR REPLACE ] ROLE [ IF NOT EXISTS ] <name>
  [ COMMENT = '<string_literal>' ]
  [ [ WITH ] TAG ( <tag_name> = '<tag_value>' [ , <tag_name> = '<tag_value>' , ... ] ) ]

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Variant syntax¶

CREATE OR ALTER ROLE¶

Creates a new role if it doesn’t already exist, or transforms an existing role into the role defined in the statement. A CREATE OR ALTER ROLE statement follows the syntax rules of a CREATE ROLE statement and has the same limitations as an ALTER ROLE statement.

CREATE OR ALTER ROLE <name>
  [ COMMENT = '<string_literal>' ]

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For more information, see CREATE OR ALTER ROLE usage notes.

Required parameters¶

name

Identifier for the role; must be unique for your account.

The identifier must start with an alphabetic character and cannot contain spaces or special characters unless the entire identifier string is enclosed in double quotes (e.g. "My object"). Identifiers enclosed in double quotes are also case-sensitive.

For more details, see Identifier requirements.

Optional parameters¶

COMMENT = 'string_literal'

Specifies a comment for the role.

Default: No value

TAG ( tag_name = 'tag_value' [ , tag_name = 'tag_value' , ... ] )

Specifies the tag name and the tag string value.

The tag value is always a string, and the maximum number of characters for the tag value is 256.

For information about specifying tags in a statement, see Tag quotas for objects and columns.

Access control requirements¶

A role used to execute this SQL command must have the following privileges at a minimum:

Privilege	Object	Notes
CREATE ROLE	Account	Only the USERADMIN role, or a higher role, has this privilege by default. The privilege can be granted to additional roles as needed.
OWNERSHIP	Database role	Required to execute a CREATE OR ALTER ROLE statement for an existing role. OWNERSHIP is a special privilege on an object that is automatically granted to the role that created the object, but can also be transferred using the GRANT OWNERSHIP command to a different role by the owning role (or any role with the MANAGE GRANTS privilege).

Privilege

Object

Notes

CREATE ROLE

Account

Only the USERADMIN role, or a higher role, has this privilege by default. The privilege can be granted to additional roles as needed.

OWNERSHIP

Database role

Required to execute a CREATE OR ALTER ROLE statement for an existing role.

OWNERSHIP is a special privilege on an object that is automatically granted to the role that created the object, but can also be transferred using the GRANT OWNERSHIP command to a different role by the owning role (or any role with the MANAGE GRANTS privilege).

For instructions on creating a custom role with a specified set of privileges, see Creating custom roles.

For general information about roles and privilege grants for performing SQL actions on securable objects, see Overview of Access Control.

General usage notes¶

Regarding metadata:

Attention

Customers should ensure that no personal data (other than for a User object), sensitive data, export-controlled data, or other regulated data is entered as metadata when using the Snowflake service. For more information, see Metadata fields in Snowflake.
CREATE OR REPLACE <object> statements are atomic. That is, when an object is replaced, the old object is deleted and the new object is created in a single transaction.

CREATE OR ALTER ROLE usage notes¶

All limitations of the ALTER ROLE command apply.
Setting or unsetting a tag is not supported; however, existing tags are not altered by a CREATE OR ALTER ROLE statement and remain unchanged.

Examples¶

CREATE ROLE myrole;

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