Yes. Start from known-good database and then update or insert with needed deltas. You could even have more than you need in the template file and truncate/drop what is not relevant for the current context. Depending on the situation, it might be faster to start from a database containing all of the possible things.
This makes sense. Just do a copy or copy-on-write to an existing database file; you could even have the actual bytes of an empty (or pre-DDL'ed) sqlite file in memory in your app, rather than needing to do a disk copy.
