creating database for theme

I’ve just read the http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_Tables_with_Plugins and although it seem pretty straight forward, I was wondering if it will work the same for theme development?

I’m also worried about using register_activation_hook() since it says in the codex that

This hook is now fired only when the user activates the plugin and not when an automatic plugin update occurs

I can’t seem to find any articles online that creates database tables with themes though. Is it even possible to create database tables with themes?