DROP TABLE IF EXISTS not working on Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Question

I used the SQL Server management studio to generate script against Azure Data Warehouse. I selected Edition Azure Data Warehouse, it generates below the script to drop table if it exists and create table. However, the script cannot pass validation. Please see below for the error message.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS Table1
GO

Error message:

Parse error at line: 2, column: 12: Incorrect syntax near 'IF'.

Answer 1

As indicated in the documentation, DROP TABLE IF EXISTS is not currently supported in Azure SQL Data Warehouse, as at today:

-- Syntax for SQL Server and Azure SQL Database  
DROP TABLE [ IF EXISTS ] [ database_name . [ schema_name ] . | schema_name . ]  
table_name [ ,...n ]  
[ ; ]

-- Syntax for Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Parallel Data Warehouse    
DROP TABLE [ database_name . [ schema_name ] . | schema_name . ] table_name   
[;] 

Answer 2

Bob's answer is correct. I tried to add the following as a comment, but it looked terrible without formatting.

You can use the following syntax as an alternative:

if object_id ('dw.dim_location','U') is not null drop table dw.dim_location;