DELETE MySQL table IF EXISTS using DROP query inside Try Except block in Python

We will use SQL DROP Query to delete table in our database student table.

Drop table query to delete MySQL table.

DROP table student

If the table is not available then Error message we will get, so better to use IF EXISTS query while deleting table

DROP table IF EXISTS student

The above DROP table SQL command, we can use in Python script to delete MySQL table.
Here first we have created one SQLAlchemy connection string. Then executed the DROP sql to delete table.

from sqlalchemy import create_engine
my_conn = create_engine("mysql+mysqldb://userid:password@localhost/database_name")

With query

from sqlalchemy import create_engine
my_conn = create_engine("mysql+mysqldb://id:pw@localhost/my_db")    

my_conn.execute("DROP table IF EXISTS student")

Using MySQL connector

import mysql.connector

my_conn = mysql.connector.connect(
  host="localhost",
  user="root",
  passwd="password",
  database="my_database"
)
####### end of connection ####
my_cursor = my_conn.cursor()
my_cursor.execute("DROP table IF EXISTS student")

We can capture the error message if any returned by MySQL database by using try except. Here is the code.

import mysql.connector

my_conn = mysql.connector.connect(
  host="localhost",
  user="userid",
  passwd="password",
  database="my_database"
)
####### end of connection ####
my_cursor = my_conn.cursor()
try:
    my_cursor.execute("DROP table  student")
except mysql.connector.Error as my_error:
    print(my_error)
else:
    print("Table deleted ")

Output is here

Table deleted

In above code we have not used IF EXISTS in our SQL statement to generate the error message. Note that if there is no error then the else part will display the message saying Table delete.

Deleting multiple tables

We can change the query to delete multiple tables. Here is the query part.

DROP TABLE `content`, `content_admin`, `content_cat`, `content_cmt_post`

Dropping a unique constraints

We can use DROP sql command to remove unique constraints associated to any column, here is an example.

ALTER TABLE 'content_cat' DROP INDEX  'cat_id'

The above command will remove the unique index associated with cat_id field of content_cat table

Delete MySQL Database

We can also use DROP Sql command to delete a complete database. Here is the sample code

DROP DATABASE TEST

MySQL Delete records More on Error handling

Python functions for MySQL Collect records Python- Tutorials

Subhendu Mohapatra

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Delete MySQL Table.

Deleting multiple tables

Dropping a unique constraints

Delete MySQL Database

Subhendu Mohapatra