What is the most portable way to check whether a trigger exists in SQL Server?

Question

I\'m looking for the most portable method to check for existence of a trigger in MS SQL Server. It needs to work on at least SQL Server 2000, 2005 and prefe

Answer 1

If you're trying to find a server scoped DDL Trigger on SQL Server 2014, you should try sys.server_triggers.

IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.server_triggers WHERE name = 'your trigger name')
BEGIN
    {do whatever you want here}
END

If I told tou anything incorrect, please let me know.

Edit: I didn't check for this dm on another versions of SQL Server.

Answer 2

Tested and doesn't work on SQL Server 2000:

select * from sys.triggers where name = 'MyTrigger'

---

Tested and works ok on SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005:

select * from dbo.sysobjects
where name = 'MyTrigger' and OBJECTPROPERTY(id, 'IsTrigger')

Answer 3

Assuming it is a DML trigger:

IF OBJECT_ID('your_trigger', 'TR') IS NOT NULL
BEGIN
    PRINT 'Trigger exists'
END
ELSE
BEGIN
    PRINT 'Trigger does not exist'
END

For other types of objects (tables, views, keys, whatever...), see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190324.aspx under 'type'.

Answer 4

There's also the preferred "sys.triggers" catalog view:

select * from sys.triggers where name = 'MyTrigger'

or call the sp_Helptrigger stored proc:

exec sp_helptrigger 'MyTableName'

But other than that, I guess that's about it :-)

Marc

Update (for Jakub Januszkiewicz):

If you need to include the schema information, you could also do something like this:

SELECT
    (list of columns)
FROM sys.triggers tr
INNER JOIN sys.tables t ON tr.parent_id = t.object_id
WHERE t.schema_id = SCHEMA_ID('dbo')   -- or whatever you need

Answer 5

In addition to the excellent answer by marc_s:

if the existence check is intended prior to dropping or modifying the trigger in some way, use a direct TSQL try/Catch bock, as the fastest means.

For instance:

BEGIN TRY
    DROP TRIGGER MyTableAfterUpdate;
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
    SELECT ERROR_NUMBER() AS erno WHERE erno = 3701; -- may differ in SQL Server < 2005
END CATCH;

The Error Message will be

Cannot drop the trigger 'MyTableAfterUpdate', because it does not exist or you do not have permission.

Then simply check if the Executed Result returned rows or not, which is easy in direct sql as well as the programmatic APIs (C#,...).

Answer 6

This works on SQL Server 2000 and above

IF OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID('{your_trigger}'), 'IsTrigger') = 1
BEGIN
    ...
END

Note that the naive converse doesn't work reliably:

-- This doesn't work for checking for absense
IF OBJECTPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID('{your_trigger}'), 'IsTrigger') <> 1
BEGIN
    ...
END

...because if the object doesn't exist at all, OBJECTPROPERTY returns NULL, and NULL is (of course) not <> 1 (or anything else).

On SQL Server 2005 or later, you could use COALESCE to deal with that, but if you need to support SQL Server 2000, you'll have to structure your statement to deal with the three possible return values: NULL (the object doesn't exist at all), 0 (it exists but is not a trigger), or 1 (it's a trigger).