Running Powershell CMDLET and Permissions

​This question comes up quite often. What permissions does a user need to execute a command in the SharePoint 2010 Shell?

Short answer is you will need SharePoint_Shell_Access access.

To give user SharePoint_Shell_Access access run the following command

-Database switch is optional and if the database is not specified the configuration database is used.

Reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607596(v=office.15).aspx​