DB Permissions with Django unit testing
After I read David's (OP) question, I was curious about this too, but I don't see the answer I was hoping to see.  So let me try to rephrase what I think at least part of what David is asking. In a production environment, I'm sure his Django models probably will not have access to create or drop tables.  His DBA will probably not allow him to have permission to do this. (Let's assume this is True).  He will only be logged into the database with regular user privileges.  But in his development environment, the Django unittest framework forces him to have higher level privileges for the unittests instead of a regular user because Django requires it to create/drop tables for the model unittests.  Since the unittests are now running at a higher privilege than will occur in production, you could argue that running the unittests in development are not 100% valid and errors could happen in production that might have been caught in development if Django could run the unittests with user privileges.
I'm curious if Django unittests will ever have the ability to create/drop tables with one user's (higher) privileges, and run the unittests with a different user's (lower) privileges.  This would help more accurately simulate the production environment in development.
Maybe in practice this is really not an issue. And the risk is so minor compared to the reward that it not worth worrying about it.
Disclaimer:
I'm very new to Django.  I must say that so far I really like it.  :)
(now for the "but"...)
But, there seems to be something I'm missing related to unit testing.  I'm working on a new project with an Oracle backend.  When you run the unit tests, it immediately gives a permissions error when trying to create the schema.  So, I get what it's trying to do (create a clean sandbox), but what I really want is to test against an existing schema.  And I want to run the test with the same username/password that my server is going to use in production.  And of course, that user is NOT going to have any kind of DDL type rights.
So, the basic problem/issue that I see boils down to this: my system (and most) want to have their "app_user" account to have ONLY the permissions needed to run.  Usually, this is basic "CRUD" permissions.  However, Django unit tests seem to need more than this to do a test run. 
How do other people handle this?  Is there some settings/work around/feature of Django that I'm not aware (please refer to the initial disclaimer).
Thanks in advance for your help.
David