Hello bithavoc, I happen to be currently working on that area of CockroachDB and I would like to help. To start with, any scenario that you find where a secur

Hello bithavoc, I happen to be currently working on that area of CockroachDB and I would like to help. To start with, any scenario that you find where a secure deployment without an Enterprise license makes you unable to operate your apps using the core features, would be a serious bug on our side and we'd give it high priority. There is no intent to do bait-and-switch here. If I read between your lines I can see the following: - you need an admin user to create databases; - the only admin user is root; - it appears that you cannot log in with root on a secure cluster (TLS enabled). Is that understanding correct? I think I understand the following: your SQL client is attempting to connect using TLS but without presenting the root client cert to the server. The root client cert is a cert that you can generate using the cluster's CA key (using the `cockroach cert` command). Without a valid client cert, the connection is refused. You may think this seems to work for other users than root. This is because for other users, when cert validation fails, the server allows the client to use a password instead. This choice to use a password is not available for the root user up to and including 19.2. Here is your way forward: - either you configure your SQL client that creates database to present the root client cert to the server. This will enable you to use the root account on a secure server and create databases (and other users, and then assign privileges to these users over the new database). - or, you wait until crdb 20.1, where it will be possible to configure a password for the root user and let root clients use password authentication instead of presenting client TLS certs. Does this help? If it doesn't please create an issue on github and describe your situation in more details and cc me (@knz). Thank you