---
title: Database Access Access Controls
description: Role-based access control (RBAC) for Teleport Database Access.
---

# Database Access Role-Based Access Control

Role-based access control (or RBAC, for short) allows administrators to set up
granular access policies for databases connected to Teleport.

An example of a policy could be, *"database administrators have access to
everything, QA team and engineers have full access to staging databases, and
engineers can gain temporary access to the production database in case of
emergency"*.

For a more general description of Teleport roles and examples see [RBAC](../access-controls/introduction.mdx), as
this section focuses on configuring RBAC for Database Access.

## Role configuration

Teleport's "role" resource provides the following instruments for restricting
database access:

```yaml
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: developer
spec:
  allow:
    # Label selectors for database instances this role has access to.
    #
    # These will be matched against the static/dynamic labels set on the
    # database service.
    db_labels:
      environment: ["dev", "stage"]

    # Database account names this role can connect as.
    db_users: ["viewer", "editor"]

    # Database names this role will be able to connect to.
    #
    # Note, this is not the same as the "name" field in "db_service", this is
    # the database names within a particular database instance.
    #
    # Also note, this setting has effect only for PostgreSQL. It does not
    # currently have any effect on MySQL databases/schemas.
    db_names: ["main", "metrics", "postgres"]
```

It is possible to use wildcards to match any database names/users.

For example, the following role permits access to any database/user within a
production database except for the internal "postgres" database/user:

```yaml
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
  name: developer
spec:
  allow:
    db_labels:
      environment: ["prod"]
    db_users: ["*"]
    db_names: ["*"]
  deny:
    db_users: ["postgres"]
    db_names: ["postgres"]
```

<Admonition
  type="note"
  title="Deny Rules"
>
  Deny rules will match greedily. In the example above, a database connection
  attempting to use "postgres" database account (regardless of database instance
  or database name) or "postgres" database name (regardless of database instance
  or database account) will be rejected.
</Admonition>

## Database names

There's a distinction in how different database servers handle logical databases
which leads to a difference in how `db_names` role field is applied to a connection
attempt.

PostgreSQL supports multiple logical databases, and each logical database can
contain multiple schemas. In order to change to a different database, a user
disconnects from the current one and establishes a new connection. During a
PostgreSQL connection attempt, `db_names` field is checked against the name
of the logical database that the user is connecting to.

In MySQL a logical "database" and a "schema" are synonyms for each other, and
the scope of permissions a user has once connected is determined by the permission
grants set on the account within the database. As such, `db_names` role field
is not currently enforced on MySQL connection attempts.

## Template variables

Similar to other role fields, `db_*` fields support templating variables.

The `{{external.xyz}}` variables are replaced with values from external [SSO](../access-controls/sso.mdx)
providers. For OIDC, they will be expanded with a value of an "xyz" claim; for
SAML — with an "xyz" assertion value.

For example, here is what a role may look like if you want to assign allowed
database names from the user's Okta `databases` assertion:

```yaml
spec:
  allow:
    db_names: ["{{external.databases}}"]
```

The `{{internal.db_users}}` and `{{internal.db_names}}` variables permit sharing
allowed database accounts and names with remote clusters. They will be replaced
with the respective properties of a remote user connecting from a root cluster.

For example, suppose a user in the root cluster has the following role:

```yaml
spec:
  allow:
    db_users: ["postgres"]
    db_names: ["postgres"]
```

The role on the leaf cluster can be set up to use the user's allowed database
accounts and names:

```yaml
spec:
  allow:
    db_users: ["{{internal.db_users}}"]
    db_names: ["{{internal.db_names}}"]
```