Re: Does this table exist?

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)protecne(dot)cl> writes:
> Now, the question is: Is there a way to know if a given table exist?

Several people pointed out that you can easily do that by fishing around
in the system catalogs, but that seems like a bad solution to me. How
will you distinguish the tables that correspond to customers from the
other tables that are hanging around your database?

Seems like a better approach is to make an additional table that lists
all the customers and the names of their dedicated tables. I won't
argue with you about whether you really need a dedicated table for the
bulky per-customer info, but surely there are a lot of smaller per-
customer items --- name, address, phone, that sort of thing --- that
are most reasonably kept in a master table. Just add a column for the
name of the bulky table.

Also, you might want to think about making all these per-customer tables
be inheritance children of a single prototype table.

regards, tom lane