Check table exist or not before create it in Oracle

Question

Trying to check is table exist before create in Oracle. Search for most of the post from Stackoverflow and others too. Find some query but it didn\'t work for me.

Answer 1

Well there are lot of answeres already provided and lot are making sense too.

Some mentioned it is just warning and some giving a temp way to disable warnings. All that will work but add risk when number of transactions in your DB is high.

I came across similar situation today and here is very simple query I came up with...

declare
begin
  execute immediate '
    create table "TBL" ("ID" number not null)';
  exception when others then
    if SQLCODE = -955 then null; else raise; end if;
end;
/

955 is failure code.

This is simple, if exception come while running query it will be suppressed. and you can use same for SQL or Oracle.

Answer 2

As Rene also commented, it's quite uncommon to check first and then create the table. If you want to have a running code according to your method, this will be:

declare
nCount NUMBER;
v_sql LONG;

begin
SELECT count(*) into nCount FROM dba_tables where table_name = 'EMPLOYEE';
IF(nCount <= 0)
THEN
v_sql:='
create table EMPLOYEE
(
ID NUMBER(3),
NAME VARCHAR2(30) NOT NULL
)';
execute immediate v_sql;

END IF;
end;

But I'd rather go catch on the Exception, saves you some unnecessary lines of code:

declare
v_sql LONG;
begin

v_sql:='create table EMPLOYEE
  (
  ID NUMBER(3),
  NAME VARCHAR2(30) NOT NULL
  )';
execute immediate v_sql;

EXCEPTION
    WHEN OTHERS THEN
      IF SQLCODE = -955 THEN
        NULL; -- suppresses ORA-00955 exception
      ELSE
         RAISE;
      END IF;
END; 
/