@Ian Maloney looks like you're out of luck http://hdb.docs.pivotal.io/210/hawq/clientaccess/roles_privs.html Apache HAWQ is offered by Hortonworks but support primarily is offered by Pivotal. We cannot speak for design decisions of our partners. I will see if I can escalate this to our partner relations group.
Secure the gpadmin system user. HAWQ requires a UNIX user id to install and initialize the HAWQ system. This system user is referred to as gpadmin in the HAWQ documentation. This gpadmin user is the default database superuser in HAWQ, as well as the file system owner of the HAWQ installation and its underlying data files. This default administrator account is fundamental to the design of HAWQ. The system cannot run without it, and there is no way to limit the access of this gpadmin user id. Use roles to manage who has access to the database for specific purposes. You should only use the gpadmin account for system maintenance tasks such as expansion and upgrade. Anyone who logs on to a HAWQ host as this user id can read, alter or delete any data; specifically system catalog data and database access rights. Therefore, it is very important to secure the gpadmin user id and only provide access to essential system administrators. Administrators should only log in to HAWQ as gpadmin when performing certain system maintenance tasks (such as upgrade or expansion). Database users should never log on as gpadmin , and ETL or production workloads should never run as gpadmin .
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