suid to script owner?

Hello, I am installing PHP4 on my system soon and I am wondering about the prospects of making it so that .php scripts will execute with the privileges of their owner so that people don't have to chmod 777 their flatfile databases. The manual at http://www.php.net/manual/html/install.unix.html says "However, the CGI version enables Apache users to run different PHP-enabled pages under different user-ids." The wording would imply that I must compile PHP as CGI (which is inefficient?) in order to be able to do this. Is this true? Is there a way I compile it as an Apache module, but still have it suid to the script owner? Thanks, -Philip Mak (pmak@aaanime.net)