MySQL: DROP TABLE Statement

This tutorial explains how to use the MySQL DROP TABLE statement with syntax and examples.

Description

The MySQL DROP TABLE statement allows you to remove or delete a table from the MySQL database.

Syntax

In its simplest form, the syntax for the DROP TABLE statement in MySQL is:

DROP TABLE table_name;

However, the full syntax for the MySQL DROP TABLE statement is:

DROP [ TEMPORARY ] TABLE [ IF EXISTS ]
table_name1, table_name2, ...
[ RESTRICT | CASCADE ];

Parameters or Arguments

TEMPORARY

Optional. It specifies that only temporary tables should be dropped by the DROP TABLE statement.

table_name

The name of the table to remove from the database.

table_name1, table_name2

The tables to remove from the database, if removing more than one table in the DROP TABLE statement.

IF EXISTS

Optional. If specified, the DROP TABLE statement will not raise an error if one of the tables does not exist.

RESTRICT

Optional. It has no impact or effect on the DROP TABLE statement but is included in the syntax to make porting the tables to different databases easier.

CASCADE

Optional. It has no impact or effect on the DROP TABLE statement but is included in the syntax to make porting the tables to different databases easier.

Note

• If you use the MySQL DROP TABLE statement to drop one or more tables that do not exist, the database will raise an error (unless you specify the IF EXISTS parameter in the DROP TABLE statement).

Example

Let's look at an example that shows how to drop a table using the MySQL DROP TABLE statement.

Drop One Table

First, let's look at a simple DROP TABLE example that shows how to use the DROP TABLE statement to drop one table in MySQL.

For example:

DROP TABLE customers;

This DROP TABLE example would delete the table called customers.

Drop Multiple Tables

Let's look at an example where we want to drop more than one table using the DROP TABLE statement:

For example:

DROP TABLE customers, suppliers;

This DROP TABLE statement example would delete two tables - customers and suppliers. If we were worried that one of the tables doesn't exist and we don't want to raise an error, we could modify our DROP TABLE statement as follows:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS customers, suppliers;

This example would delete the customers and suppliers tables and would not raise an error if one of the tables didn't exist.

Drop Temporary Table

Finally, let's look at an example that shows how to use the DROP TABLE statement to drop a temporary table.

DROP TEMPORARY TABLE IF EXISTS customers;

This DROP TABLE example will only delete the temporary table called customers. If there was also a permanent table called customers, this DROP TABLE statement would not delete it because TEMPORARY is specified.