Question about MySQL "create if not exists" performance.
duskwuff: This really shouldn't be necessary at all. In a well-designed application, the table schema should be completely known to the application at all times -- the existence of a table should never be in doubt. If for some reason this isn't the case, you'll be much better served by catching "table doesn't exist" errors when they occur rather than preemptively trying to create tables which already exist.