Existence confirmation method of the table of MySQL

Question

I want to confirm whether there is a certain table. When create a table, there is an SQL sentence such as DROP TABLE IF EXISTS xxx_tb. Will there be the method that can identify the existence of the table by SQL likewise?

Answer 1

You want the SHOW TABLES command of MySQL:

SHOW TABLES LIKE 'xxx_tb';

Answer 2

Or indeed, you can just do a query like

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tbl WHERE 1=0

Which will give an error (see documentation for exact error code, or try it) if the table doesn't exist, but succeed with no results if it does.

Answer 3

Use INFORMATION_SCHEMA:

select * from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES where TABLE_NAME = 'MyTable';

Should be portable across most databases.