On 11/21/13, 2:35 AM, Pavel Stehule wrote: > I am feeling, so almost all people prefer > > DROP TRIGGER [ IF EXISTS ] name ON table_name [ CASCADE | RESTRICT ]; > > Can we live with it?
Fine with me.
I think it helps if you consider IF EXISTS an attribute of the command, not an attribute of the command parameters.
Now we should be aware that this sort of sets a precedent for ALTER TABLE IF EXISTS ... DROP ANYTHING ... and similar composite commands.
If might be worth checking other SQL databases. We stole the IF EXISTS from somewhere, I believe.
I did some searching:
So DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS is supported by
SQL anywhere, MySQL
Doesn't support:
MS SQL server (conditional drops is by T-SQL IF EXISTS() statement), Oracle, DB2,
But significant difference between PostgreSQL and other databases is requirement to specify table in DROP statement. So in SQL anywhere or in MySQL DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS is fully fault tolerant, there are not possibility to specify table.
Note: DROP TRIGGER ON tablename is PostgreSQL feature - no other databases (without PostgreSQL forks) uses this syntax - so we don't need thinking what is in (or what will be) in ANSI standard (or what other databases does). In this moment syntax of DROP TRIGGER is non standard. So if we can adopt design (idea) in SQL anywhere or MySQL, then DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS should be enough. In our implementation there are two conditions, but we should not to check if target table exists (from statement purpose).
So now, +1 for using "DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS name ON tablename" without requirement for tablename