Subject: Using pgAudit to audit interesting tables for all users except for batch user?

From: "Colin 't Hart" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2025 10:17:44 +0100

Hi,

One of my clients has some tables that contain sensitive data. These are
modified regularly by batch jobs, and then the data is transformed and
summary information appended to other tables (fairly typical datawarehouse).

For these sensitive tables they would like to add auditing of all activity
-- but not for the batch user as that would just blow up the logs, and we
should be able to adequately prevent access to the batch user.

Is there any way we can achieve this?

I tried using a role, registering that with

alter system set pgaudit.role = <auditrole>;

and doing

grant select,insert,update,delete
on <sensetivetable>
to <auditrole>;

After that all operations on that table ended up audited in the log, as
expected.

Then I did

alter user <batchuser> set pgaudit.log to 'none';

but after that operations when logged in as <batchuser> still ended up
being audited.

What am I missing?

Is what I'm trying even possible? Or is there another way to achieve our
requirements?

This issue https://github.com/issues/recent?issue=pgaudit%7Cpgaudit%7C73
seems to indicate that it's possible, but I'm struggling to understand how.

Thanks,

Colin

---

From: Greg Sabino Mullane <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2025 10:10:46 -0500

> alter user <batchuser> set pgaudit.log to 'none';

That's close! pgaudit.log deals with session level things, but you want to
exclude object-level things. Try:

create role skip_pguadit;
alter user <batchuser> set pgaudit.role = 'skip_pgaudit';

Cheers,
Greg

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