[GENERAL] Understanding database schemas

[Melvin Call]

Good morning all,

I am trying to get a better understanding of how schemas can be used to
limit access to objects, and I seem to be failing miserably. Can anyone
point me to documentation about, or a decent tutorial on, schema usage for
access separation? I have tried to understand through the user guide. It
leads me to believe that ownership of a schema gives the owner all rights
to it, but my experimentation seems to indicate otherwise. Creating a
schema as superuser and assigning ownership of it to another role does not
seem to make it visible to that role:

$ psql -U postgres

DROP SCHEMA IF EXISTS hrschema CASCADE;
DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS personnel;
DROP USER IF EXISTS hr_admin;

CREATE USER hr_admin
   WITH CREATEDB
   PASSWORD 'md5be394806d6a21c6c52aa2b76063c7d9d';

DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS personnel;
CREATE DATABASE personnel
   WITH ENCODING='UTF8'
   OWNER=hr_admin
   TEMPLATE=template0
   LC_COLLATE='C'
   LC_CTYPE='C'
   CONNECTION LIMIT=-1;

CREATE SCHEMA hrschema
AUTHORIZATION hr_admin;

\dnS+
                                     List of schemas
        Name        |  Owner   |  Access privileges   |
Description
--------------------+----------+----------------------+----------------------------------
 hrschema           | hr_admin |                      |
 information_schema | postgres | postgres=UC/postgres+|
                    |          | =U/postgres          |
 pg_catalog         | postgres | postgres=UC/postgres+| system catalog
schema
                    |          | =U/postgres          |
 pg_temp_1          | postgres |                      |
 pg_toast           | postgres |                      | reserved schema for
TOAST tables
 pg_toast_temp_1    | postgres |                      |
 public             | postgres | postgres=UC/postgres+| standard public
schema
                    |          | =UC/postgres         |
(7 rows)

ALTER USER hr_admin
   SET search_path
   TO hrschema, public;

\q

$ psql -U hr_admin personnel

SHOW search_path;
   search_path
------------------
 hrschema, public
(1 row)

\dnS+
                                     List of schemas
        Name        |  Owner   |  Access privileges   |
Description
--------------------+----------+----------------------+----------------------------------
 information_schema | postgres | postgres=UC/postgres+|
                    |          | =U/postgres          |
 pg_catalog         | postgres | postgres=UC/postgres+| system catalog
schema
                    |          | =U/postgres          |
 pg_temp_1          | postgres |                      |
 pg_toast           | postgres |                      | reserved schema for
TOAST tables
 pg_toast_temp_1    | postgres |                      |
 public             | postgres | postgres=UC/postgres+| standard public
schema
                    |          | =UC/postgres         |
(6 rows)

The lack of Access privileges seems to be the key, but I am failing to
understand why an object's owner would not be given any access to it by
default.

Thanks,
Melvin