PostgreSQL – How to Revoke Delete Permission from Table for Database Owner

I just wrote about this in my answer to Granting rights on postgresql database to another user on ServerFault.

Basically, the best solution when you have a single user and you want to grant other users the same rights is to turn that user into a group, create a new user with the same name as the original one that's a member of the group, and grant that group to other users too.

So in your case, rails gets renamed to say myapp_users, then you create a new login role (user) named rails and GRANT myapp_users TO rails. Now you an GRANT myapp_users TO meltemi. Both the new rails account and the meltemi user now have the rights of the old railsaccount.

For more fine-grained control I ususally advise that you avoid giving the day-to-day login users or their groups ownership of the tables. Give them access via a NOINHERIT group they must explicitly SET GROUP to, or better, use a completely different user for privileged operations like DDL and GRANTs. Unfortunately this doesn't work with Rails, because Rails likes to apply migrations whenever it feels like it and AFAIK doesn't give you the ability to specify a different, more-privileged user to run the migrations as.

You want ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES.

Give the rds_superuser default access rights to all new tables.

This only affects tables created after the ALTER. For existing tables you must GRANT rights.