Check if table exists in SQL Server

Question

I would like this to be the ultimate discussion on how to check if a table exists in SQL Server 2000/2005 using SQL Statements.

When you Google for the answer, you g

Answer 1

i taking here creating a view as example.

Because ALTER/CREATE commands can't be within BEGIN/END blocks. You need to test for existence and the drop it before doing a create

IF Object_ID('TestView') IS NOT NULL
DROP VIEW TestView

GO

CREATE VIEW TestView
   as
   . . .

GO

If you are woried about the permissions being lost you can script the GRANT statements as well and re-run those at the end.

You could wrap the create/alter into a string and do an EXEC - that might get ugly for large views

DECLARE @SQL as varchar(4000)

-- set to body of view
SET @SQL = 'SELECT X, Y, Z FROM TABLE' 

IF Object_ID('TestView') IS NULL
    SET @SQL = 'CREATE VIEW TestView AS ' + @SQL
ELSE    
    SET @SQL = 'ALTER VIEW TestView AS ' + @SQL