Check existence of table

[Bill Earnhardt]

I need to be able to test for the existence of a table in oracle using a java stored procedure. If it exists, I populate it, it doesn't, I create it and then populate.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Bill

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Bill,
Most databases have a table that lists all the tables in the database. I think it is called ALL_TABLES in Oracle. You could query this table to check for the existence of a table. If the query returns zero rows, you create it as you described.

[Bill Earnhardt]

Jeanne, thanks for the helpful information and found the table you were talking about. I'll give this a try and let you know the outcome.
Thank you!

[Chinmay Bajikar]

A generic way might be to use the
Connection.getMetaData(),which will return you a DatabaseMetaData object.
you can use the getTables() api in there to get the list of tables.
Why write some db specific code when you can solve the whole thing through
generic JDBC code???
Another question that I might think of here is which one would be more efficient.
Writing something like "select tname from tab" or using the DatabaseMetadata approach??
Thanks,
Chinmay

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Chinmay,
Bill mentioned he is using a stored procedure. So he is probably locked into Oracle anyway (stored procs tend to be db specific.) I think the SQL query would be more efficient because it only needs to return one item rather than the list of tables. This could make a difference if there are a lot of tables.