The information about Alibaba Cloud console accounts and the PolarDB database accounts. - PolarDB

This topic introduces the basic concepts of PolarDB console accounts and PolarDB cluster accounts.

Console accounts

You can use the following accounts to log on to the console:

Alibaba Cloud account: This account allows flexible control of all your Alibaba Cloud resources and is used for billing purposes. You must create an Alibaba Cloud account before you purchase Alibaba Cloud services.
RAM user: Optional. You can create and manage RAM users in the Resource Access Management (RAM) console to share resources among multiple users. A RAM user does not have ownership over resources. Charges incurred are billed to the Alibaba Cloud account.

You can use the following accounts to log on to your database cluster. For more information, see Create a database account.

Account type	Description
Privileged Account	Can be created and managed only through the console or an API. You can create multiple privileged accounts for a cluster. A privileged account can manage all standard accounts and databases. Offers advanced permissions for personalized, fine-grained access control. For example, you can grant users query permissions on specific tables. Has full permissions on all databases within the cluster. Can disconnect any account connection.
Standard Account	Can be created and managed through the console, an API, or SQL statements. You can create multiple standard accounts for a cluster. The number of accounts that you can create varies based on the database engine. You must manually grant permissions on specific databases to a standard account. A standard account cannot create, manage, or disconnect the connections of other accounts.

API	Description
CreateAccount	Creates an account.
DescribeAccounts	Queries the accounts of a specified cluster.
ModifyAccountDescription	Modifies the description of a database account for a PolarDB cluster.
ModifyAccountPassword	Changes the password of a database account.
DeleteAccount	Deletes an account.