Testing for the existence of a table

  • Thread starter Thread starter Greg Shannan
  • Start date Start date
G

Greg Shannan

All:

Is there some standard way I can test for the existence of a database table?

I am using ODBC with an ingres database; and I don't really want to open a query
like "select * ...." because I may end up reading the whole thing in, when all I
want to know is if the table exists.

I'm just wondering if there is a standard way in ado with ODBC.

TIA

.... Greg Shannan
 
Hi Greg,

The answer lies in Ingres. In SQL Server, for example, it's an easy matter
of identifying table objects by tablename using an sp with code like this:

if exists (select * from information_schema.tables where table_name =
'a_radj')

Is there similar objects in Ingres?

Bernie
 
Bernie:

Yes, there is a table with similar info. I was hoping not to have to use it,
but it seems this is the accepted way.

Thanks.

.... Greg Shannan
 
In SQL Server, we can do a SELECT [Name] FROM sysobjects WHERE [Name] =
@NameWanted
I expect that there might be similar tables in Ingress...

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Just a note that only ado.net supported way to extract metadata without
doing selects is by using OleDbConnection.GetOleDbSchemaTable method.
 
I have not tried this but you might be able to use:

select * from table where 1=0

I think this will bring in the table schema, if it exists, but no data. Be sure to wrap it in a try-catch to get the exception if there is no table. If this works, it will work regardless of the data source.
 
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