php - Multi-tenancy - Create tables up-front or as needed?

Solution:

Using an insert to test whether a table exists may not be your best bet, particularly considering the size of the row and latency to the database server. A better solution might be to use 'show tables', i.e.:

SHOW TABLES LIKE 'TABLENAME';
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The resultset will be something like this:

Tables_in_DATABASENAME (TABLENAME)
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If the number of rows is zero, clearly the table does not exist.

As far as your process is concerned -- I think I'd take a hybrid approach. When the customer upgrades and as part of your provisioning workflow create all the tables needed to provide the new services to the customer. That way the customer doesn't take up any more resources (disk mainly, in this case) than they're paying for, and you're not causing yourself the pain of provisioning dynamically.

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