In postgres, any session variable can be set at the user/role level so it will be set automatically when that user connects. For example, this could be used to set a user-scope default time zone without changing the global default from UTC or dealing with the raciness of cluster settings.

ALTER USER foo SET timezone='America/New_York';

This is especially useful because postgres drivers don't typically have the facility to automatically issue a SET TIME ZONE command at the start of each session (a feature which is commonly found in mysql drivers, for example).

Epic CRDB-2507