DROP ROLE

Removes a role. The Control Plane cascades the removal: role grants and direct object grants for this role are revoked.

Category: securityPrivilege: ManageRolesDeltaForge extension

Syntax

DROP ROLE [IF EXISTS] <name>

Description

## Overview DROP ROLE removes a role from the RBAC catalog. All assignments of this role to users, groups, and service principals are revoked, and all direct grants targeting this role on objects are removed. ## Behavior - Without IF EXISTS, dropping a non-existent role raises an error. With IF EXISTS, the operation succeeds silently. - Cascading removal: every assignment of the role to a principal is dropped. Every grant on a zone, schema, table, external location, or storage credential targeting the role is removed. - Roles that inherit from this role lose the inheritance link. Their parent reference becomes dangling and must be repaired with ALTER ROLE if continued inheritance is intended. ## Access Control Requires the `ManageRoles` privilege. ## Compatibility DeltaForge extension.

Parameters

Name	Type	Description
`name`		Specifies the role to drop.
`if_exists`		Skip silently when the role does not exist.

Examples

DROP ROLE old_analyst;

DROP ROLE IF EXISTS old_analyst;

Pitfalls

Roles that INHERIT from the dropped role are not auto-rewired. The parent reference becomes dangling: those child roles continue to exist but no longer inherit anything until ALTER ROLE sets a new parent.