How to check if a Cassandra table exists

Question

Is there an easy way to check if table (column family) is defined in Cassandra using CQL (or API perhaps, using com.datastax.driver)?

Right now I am leaning towards exec

Answer 1

I just needed to manually check for the existence of a table using cqlsh. Possibly useful general info.

describe keyspace_name.table_name

If it doesn't exist you'll get 'table_name' not found in keyspace 'keyspace' If it does exist you'll get a description of the table.