Check if a temporary table exists and delete if it exists before creating a temporary table

Question

I am using the following code to check if the temporary table exists and drop the table if it exists before creating again. It works fine as long as I don\'t change the colu

Answer 1

Instead of dropping and re-creating the temp table you can truncate and reuse it

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb..#Results') IS NOT NULL
    Truncate TABLE #Results
else
    CREATE TABLE #Results
    (
        Company             CHAR(3),
        StepId              TINYINT,
        FieldId             TINYINT,
    )

If you are using Sql Server 2016 or Azure Sql Database then use the below syntax to drop the temp table and recreate it. More info here MSDN

Syntax

DROP TABLE [ IF EXISTS ] [ database_name . [ schema_name ] . | schema_name . ] table_name [ ,...n ]

Query:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS tempdb.dbo.#Results
CREATE TABLE #Results
  (
   Company             CHAR(3),
   StepId              TINYINT,
   FieldId             TINYINT,
  )