Drop or delete a table in MySQL

Contributed by qmchenry December 14, 2003  
Tagged: MySQL

To remove a table from a MySQL database, and remove all of its data, use the following SQL command:

drop table if exists recipes;

The command will conditionally delete a table if it exists. The ‘if exists’ syntax is optional, but is useful when using SQL commands in a file, such as when importing data, as it will not display errors.

The command can be issued from any SQL source including an application with database connectivity (i.e., PHP, Java, etc.) or directly from mysql command (see Connect to a MySQL server using the mysql command for more information).