Feature: ADD IF NOT EXISTS and DROP IF EXISTS to ALTER TABLE command

[prrao87]

API

Other

Description

Currently, we need custom application logic to check for the presence of a column when we use ALTER TABLE. See the example below where I'm trying to add a vector column of type DOUBLE[1536] to an existing Movie table:

ALTER TABLE Movie ADD vector DOUBLE[1536];

It's easy to imagine a scenario where the user has many columns in a table during application development and they may want to have the error handled by the DDL itself.

Requested feature

For adding a new column:

ALTER TABLE Movie ADD IF NOT EXISTS vector DOUBLE[1536];

For dropping an existing column:

ALTER TABLE Movie DROP IF EXISTS vector;