To delete() or forceDelete(). A better way to determine - php

Question

I have a database with 95 tables. A users tables exists for the system users. Many other tables (45 out of the 95) have a "created_by" that refers to the user who created/added the row, through users.id.
Now. If I wanted to delete a user, I just cannot go and do $user->delete(), I need to keep the user around (soft-delete it) in case this user has created rows on other tables. But what if this user didn't add any content, then I should just go ahead and $user->forceDelete() it.
My question is: is there a good way to go about doing this? To check whether a user should be deleted or Force-deleted when we have this big number of tables.
I figured I could just loop though the tables and check if the id of the user (to be deleted) exists, if found then it's ->delete(), else it's ->forceDelete(). Here is the code:
// Get all tables
$allTables = \DB::connection()->getDoctrineSchemaManager()->listTableNames();
$tablesWithCreatedBy = [];
foreach($allTables as $tableName){
$tableColumns = \DB::getSchemaBuilder()->getColumnListing($tableName);
if(in_array('created_by', $tableColumns)){
$tablesWithCreatedBy[] = $tableName;
}
}
foreach($tablesWithCreatedBy as $tableName){
$result = \DB::select(" SELECT created_by FROM `$tableName`
WHERE `created_by` = {$this->user->id} LIMIT 0, 1 ");
if(isset($result[0])){
$this->user->delete();
break;
}
}
// If wasn't trashed from the code above, then force delete the user!
if(!$this->user->trashed()){
$this->user->forceDelete();
}
I feel there must be a better way to do it! Is there?

Answer 1

You've to add records_count to users table that will be incremented every time when user adds content to other tables, so after that change solution will be simple as:
$result = ($this->user->records_count > 0)
? $this->user->delete()
: $this->user->forceDelete();
Or write Laravel Console Command and run it at background that will walk through db and do cleanup operations.