Question

How do I drop all empty tables from a MySQL database, leaving only the tables that have at least 1 record?

EDIT: This is what I did using Python 3 with mysqlclient

import MySQLdb

conn = MySQLdb.connect(
    host='localhost', user='root',
    passwd='mypassword', db='mydatabase'
)

c = conn.cursor()
c.execute('SHOW TABLES')
for row in c.fetchall():
    table_name = row[0]
    c.execute(f'SELECT * FROM {table_name}')
    if c.rowcount == 0:
        # c.execute(f'DROP TABLE {table_name}')
        print(f'DROP TABLE {table_name}')

Answer 1

And a PHP version for completeness. It won’t drop anything, just print for you the DROP statements:

<?php
$username="root";
$password="mypassword";
$database="mydatabase";
mysql_connect('localhost',$username,$password);
mysql_select_db($database) or die( "Unable to select database");

function drop_empty_tables(){
    $tables = mysql_query('SHOW TABLES');
    while($table = mysql_fetch_array($tables)){
        $table = $table[0];
        $records = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $table");
        if(mysql_num_rows($records) == 0){
            // mysql_query("DROP TABLE $table");
            echo "DROP TABLE $table;\n";
        }
    }
}

drop_empty_tables();
?>