How to quickly drop a user with existing privileges

Question

How about

DROP USER <username>

This is actually an alias for DROP ROLE.

You have to explicity drop any privileges associated with that user, also to move its ownership to other roles (or drop the object).

This is best achieved by

REASSIGN OWNED BY <olduser> TO <newuser>

and

DROP OWNED BY <olduser>

The latter will remove any privileges granted to the user.

See the postgres docs for DROP ROLE and the more detailed description of this.

Addition:

Apparently, trying to drop a user by using the commands mentioned here will only work if you are executing them while being connected to the same database that the original GRANTS were made from, as discussed here:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/83894A1821034948BA27FE4DAA47427928F7C29922%40apde03.APD.Satcom.Local

The accepted answer resulted in errors for me when attempting REASSIGN OWNED BY or DROP OWNED BY. The following worked for me:

REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public FROM username;
REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public FROM username;
REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL FUNCTIONS IN SCHEMA public FROM username;
DROP USER username;

The user may have privileges in other schemas, in which case you will have to run the appropriate REVOKE line with "public" replaced by the correct schema. To show all of the schemas and privilege types for a user, I edited the \dp command to make this query:

SELECT 
  n.nspname as "Schema",
  CASE c.relkind 
    WHEN 'r' THEN 'table' 
    WHEN 'v' THEN 'view' 
    WHEN 'm' THEN 'materialized view' 
    WHEN 'S' THEN 'sequence' 
    WHEN 'f' THEN 'foreign table' 
  END as "Type"
FROM pg_catalog.pg_class c
LEFT JOIN pg_catalog.pg_namespace n ON n.oid = c.relnamespace
WHERE pg_catalog.array_to_string(c.relacl, E'\n') LIKE '%username%';

I'm not sure which privilege types correspond to revoking on TABLES, SEQUENCES, or FUNCTIONS, but I think all of them fall under one of the three.

Also note, if you have explicitly granted:

CONNECT ON DATABASE xxx TO GROUP ,

you will need to revoke this separately from DROP OWNED BY, using:

REVOKE CONNECT ON DATABASE xxx FROM GROUP

Here's what's finally worked for me :

REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA myschem FROM user_mike;
REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA myschem FROM user_mike;
REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL FUNCTIONS IN SCHEMA myschem FROM user_mike;
REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES ON SCHEMA myschem FROM user_mike;
ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES IN SCHEMA myschem REVOKE ALL ON SEQUENCES FROM user_mike;
ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES IN SCHEMA myschem REVOKE ALL ON TABLES FROM user_mike;
ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES IN SCHEMA myschem REVOKE ALL ON FUNCTIONS FROM user_mike;
REVOKE USAGE ON SCHEMA myschem FROM user_mike;
REASSIGN OWNED BY user_mike TO masteruser;
DROP USER user_mike ;