Question

I have a cursor which works fine but when it gets to this part of the script, it seems to still run the update even though the table doesn’t exists:

 SET @sql = 'IF (EXISTS (SELECT * FROM ps_vars_' + @datasetid + '))
             BEGIN
     UPDATE ps_vars_' + @datasetid + '
     SET    programming_notes = replace(programming_notes, ''Some of the variables listed are source variables.'')
         END';

  EXEC SP_EXECUTESQL @sql   

What am I missing? The #datasetid variable gets passed in correctly too.

Answer 1

DECLARE @tablename sysname 

SET @tablename = 'ps_vars' + @datasetid

IF (OBJECT_ID(@tablename, 'U') IS NOT NULL)
BEGIN
 SET @sql = ' UPDATE ' + QUOTENAME(@tablename) + '
     SET    programming_notes = replace(programming_notes, ''Some of the variables listed are source variables.'') ';
     EXEC sp_executesql @sql  
END