Question

I am developing a website which will collect and store information for users.

I need to create a table specific to each individual user on registration to store the information they are searching for using the website. The table created will be named after the newly registered user’s username.

Then when the user is logged in and runs the search, the data collected will be stored in a database using a MySQL insert query where the table name is a variable containing the logged-in user’s username which will also be the table name.

I am an amateur developer and have searched everywhere to try and find a solution but I cannot seem to find anything evenly remotely similar to my problem.

Thank you in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Creating tables on the fly is more trouble than it’s worth and very much swimming against the tide with any SQL database.

The reason you haven’t found any docs about the approach you mention is because this problem is generally (almost without exception) solved best by having all the data in one or more tables, and including a column to specify which entity (user) the row is associated with. In your case, this might be an email address, or a username, or just a sequential number.

E.g.

 | user_id | email   | first_name   | last_name   | fave_color   |
 -         -         -              -             -              -
 |       1 | "a@b.c" | "anton"      | "aardvark"  | "red"        |
 |       2 | "b@c.d" | "miles"      | "o'brien"   | "infrared"   |
 |     ... |         |              |             |              |