To check if a table exists with SQL in a MySQL database is pretty easy, thanks to the nifty SHOW TABLES command.
To find if a specific table exists, we simply extend the standard SHOW TABLES statement with a LIKE parameter, which allows us to search for a specific string or for a partial string using the standard % modifier. If the statement returns a non-empty result set, we know the table exists.
For example:
SHOW TABLES LIKE 'activity-log';
will return a empty result set if your database doesn’t have a table named ‘activity-log’ in it. Similarly,
SHOW TABLES LIKE '%activity-log';
will return a result set containing all tables that end with ‘activity-log’, e.g. ‘sms-activity-log’ and ‘email-activity-log’ as well as plain old ‘activity-log’ of course!
Nifty.
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