Dropping Tables
To drop a table, use the DROP TABLE command followed by the name of the table. Beware that a dropped table cannot be recovered unless you have a backup.
To drop the people table you created earlier in this lesson, use the following command:
MariaDB> DROP TABLE people; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
You can use DROP TABLE IF EXISTS so that no error occurs if a table does not exist. This is useful in a batch script that creates all the tables for a database: The script will delete the existing tables before re-creating them but will not fall over if the tables do not exist yet.