Remove a table from the database

Remove a remote table (e.g., created by dbWriteTable()) from the database.

Methods in other packages

This documentation page describes the generics. Refer to the documentation pages linked below for the documentation for the methods that are implemented in various backend packages.

• AzureKusto::dbRemoveTable("AzureKustoConnection", "ANY")

• bigrquery::dbRemoveTable("BigQueryConnection", "character")

• DatabaseConnector::dbRemoveTable("DatabaseConnectorConnection", "ANY")

• dittodb::dbRemoveTable("DBIMockConnection", "character")

• duckdb::dbRemoveTable("duckdb_connection", "character")

• odbc::dbRemoveTable("OdbcConnection", "character")

• pool::dbRemoveTable("Pool", "ANY")

• RAthena::dbRemoveTable("AthenaConnection", "character")

• RJDBC::dbRemoveTable("JDBCConnection", "ANY")

• RMariaDB::dbRemoveTable("MariaDBConnection", "character")

• RMySQL::dbRemoveTable("MySQLConnection", "character")

• RPostgres::dbRemoveTable("PqConnection", "character")

• RPostgreSQL::dbRemoveTable("PostgreSQLConnection", "character")

• RPresto::dbRemoveTable("PrestoConnection", "ANY")

• RSQLite::dbRemoveTable("SQLiteConnection", "character")

• sparklyr::dbRemoveTable("spark_connection", "character")

dbRemoveTable(conn, name, ...)

Arguments

conn

A DBIConnection object, as returned by dbConnect().

name

The table name, passed on to dbQuoteIdentifier(). Options are:

• a character string with the unquoted DBMS table name, e.g. "table_name",

• a call to Id() with components to the fully qualified table name, e.g. Id(schema = "my_schema", table = "table_name")

• a call to SQL() with the quoted and fully qualified table name given verbatim, e.g. SQL('"my_schema"."table_name"')

...

Other parameters passed on to methods.

Value

dbRemoveTable() returns TRUE, invisibly.

Failure modes

If the table does not exist, an error is raised. An attempt to remove a view with this function may result in an error.

An error is raised when calling this method for a closed or invalid connection. An error is also raised if name cannot be processed with dbQuoteIdentifier() or if this results in a non-scalar.

Additional arguments

The following arguments are not part of the dbRemoveTable() generic (to improve compatibility across backends) but are part of the DBI specification:

• temporary (default: FALSE)

• fail_if_missing (default: TRUE)

These arguments must be provided as named arguments.

If temporary is TRUE, the call to dbRemoveTable() will consider only temporary tables. Not all backends support this argument. In particular, permanent tables of the same name are left untouched.

If fail_if_missing is FALSE, the call to dbRemoveTable() succeeds if the table does not exist.

Specification

A table removed by dbRemoveTable() doesn't appear in the list of tables returned by dbListTables(), and dbExistsTable() returns FALSE. The removal propagates immediately to other connections to the same database. This function can also be used to remove a temporary table.

The name argument is processed as follows, to support databases that allow non-syntactic names for their objects:

• If an unquoted table name as string: dbRemoveTable() will do the quoting, perhaps by calling dbQuoteIdentifier(conn, x = name)

• If the result of a call to dbQuoteIdentifier(): no more quoting is done

See also

Other DBIConnection generics: DBIConnection-class, dbAppendTable(), dbCreateTable(), dbDataType(), dbDisconnect(), dbExecute(), dbExistsTable(), dbGetException(), dbGetInfo(), dbGetQuery(), dbIsReadOnly(), dbIsValid(), dbListFields(), dbListObjects(), dbListResults(), dbListTables(), dbReadTable(), dbSendQuery(), dbSendStatement(), dbWriteTable()

Examples

con <- dbConnect(RSQLite::SQLite(), ":memory:")

dbExistsTable(con, "iris")
#> [1] FALSE
dbWriteTable(con, "iris", iris)
dbExistsTable(con, "iris")
#> [1] TRUE
dbRemoveTable(con, "iris")
dbExistsTable(con, "iris")
#> [1] FALSE

dbDisconnect(con)