SQL Server equivalent to Oracle's CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW

Question

In Oracle, I can re-create a view with a single statement, as shown here:

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW MY_VIEW AS
SELECT SOME_FIELD
FROM SOME_TABLE
WHERE SOME_COND         


        

Answer 1

In SQL Server 2016 (or newer) you can use this:

CREATE OR ALTER VIEW VW_NAMEOFVIEW AS ...

In older versions of SQL server you have to use something like

DECLARE @script NVARCHAR(MAX) = N'VIEW [dbo].[VW_NAMEOFVIEW] AS ...';

IF NOT EXISTS(SELECT * FROM sys.views WHERE name = 'VW_NAMEOFVIEW')
-- IF OBJECT_ID('[dbo].[VW_NAMEOFVIEW]') IS NOT NULL
BEGIN EXEC('CREATE ' + @script) END
ELSE
BEGIN EXEC('ALTER ' + @script) END

Or, if there are no dependencies on the view, you can just drop it and recreate:

IF EXISTS(SELECT * FROM sys.views WHERE name = 'VW_NAMEOFVIEW')
-- IF OBJECT_ID('[dbo].[VW_NAMEOFVIEW]') IS NOT NULL
BEGIN 
   DROP VIEW [VW_NAMEOFVIEW];
END

CREATE VIEW [VW_NAMEOFVIEW] AS ...