Trying to add the File permission to MySQL RDS instance access denied

Hello There,

I understand that you are trying to enable ‘FILE’ permissions to the users in your RDS MySQL environment.

As RDS being a managed service, it is not possible to grant ‘FILE’ privilege to any user of RDS/RDS Aurora as the file permission requires access to the underlying file system. The essence of this restriction is to ensure stability and security of the platform. Thus in RDS/RDS Aurora, FILE privilege is not granted due to security reasons. You can refer to link [1] for more information on the privileges granted to your master user in RDS MySQL.

In most cases dealing with privileges on files, AWS customers want to move data to a file on the file system which as mentioned, is prohibited in RDS and RDS Aurora. So as a workaround in this situation would be to move the data to a different location other than the filesystem. For example, you can export the data to CSV format by selecting the data in the mysql command line client and piping the output to reformat the data as CSV.

[1] : Permissions available for the RDS Master user - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/UsingWithRDS.MasterAccounts.html