While banging my head on how to grant access to a referenced mosaic dataset , I did something out of frustration that I normally would not do–I granted ‘public’ access to some data.

Then, after figuring out the problem, I went to revoke public access using ArcCatalog and received this error message:

Error 999999: Error executing function.

The Object being referenced does not exist [ERROR:  role ‘public’ does not exist::SQL state: 42704]
Failed to execute (ChangePrivileges).

I actually expected that would occur–ArcSDE isn’t aware of PostgreSQL’s public account.

The solution was to go into pgAdmin II and revoke the privileges there.