You cannot do it with just a single MySQL command, however you can use MySQL to construct the statement for you: In the MySQL shell or through PHPMyAdmin, use the following query SELECT CONCAT( ‘DROP TABLE ‘, GROUP_CONCAT(table_name) , ‘;’ ) AS statement FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_name LIKE ‘myprefix_%’; This will generate a DROP statement … Read more
In SQL Server Management Studio, go to Options / SQL Server Object Explorer / Scripting, and enable ‘Generate script for dependent objects’. Then right click the table, script > drop to > new query window and it will generate it for you.
The best and most efficient way is to catch the “table not found” exception: this avoids the overhead of checking if the table exists twice; and doesn’t suffer from the problem that if the DROP fails for some other reason (that might be important) the exception is still raised to the caller: BEGIN EXECUTE IMMEDIATE … Read more