Postgres database create if not exists

sql database postgresql ddl
Konstantin Tarashchanskiy picture Konstantin Tarashchanskiy · Apr 4, 2013 · Viewed 19.2k times · Source

Is there an analog to CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS for creating databases?

Background: I am writing a script to automatically set up the schema in PostgreSQL on an unknown system. I am not sure if the database (or even part of the schema) was already deployed, so I want to structure my code to not fail (or ideally even show errors) if some of the structure already exists. I want to differentiate the errors that prevent me from creating a database (so abort future schema changes since they will not work) from this error.

Answer

Eelke picture Eelke · Apr 4, 2013

No but you could query the pg_catalog.pg_database table to see if it exists.

Related questions

Simulate CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS for PostgreSQL?

I want to create a database which does not exist through JDBC. Unlike MySQL, PostgreSQL does not support create if not exists syntax. What is the best way to accomplish this? The application does not know if the database exists …

Read More
Upgrading a varchar column to enum type in postgresql

We have a varchar column in a table, that we need to upgrade to enum type. All the values in the varchar column are valid values in the enumeration. There is no null values in the varchar column. ALTER TABLE …

Read More
How to select the nth row in a SQL database table?

I'm interested in learning some (ideally) database agnostic ways of selecting the nth row from a database table. It would also be interesting to see how this can be achieved using the native functionality of the following databases: SQL Server …

Read More