Ingres is designed for a wide variety of users, from database management experts who create and maintain databases, to end users who only examine or update data. Moreover, users can have multiple roles. For example, a user can be the database administrator of one Ingres database and the end user of another.

One company, for example, can have a single database administrator who controls all access to databases, whereas another company has a primary database administrator at its corporate headquarters and a local database administrator at each of its satellite sites. In the latter case, the primary database administrator controls access to corporate databases, such as sales, inventory, payroll, and human resources; and the local database administrators are responsible for authorizing access to production or research databases.

Regardless of the type of enterprise, if you are a database administrator who has been granted the maintain_users privilege, you are able to add new users to an Ingres database.