CREATE DATABASE

In this page:

Basic Database Creation
Safely Creating Databases
Creating with Character Sets
Specifying Collation Rules
Viewing the Created Database

Basic Database Creation

CREATE DATABASE followed by a name allocates a new logical container for your tables; the name must be unique on that server instance, and MySQL rejects duplicates outright without a safeguard.

Example: Basic Database Creation

sql

CREATE DATABASE shop;

Safely Creating Databases

Adding IF NOT EXISTS after CREATE DATABASE makes the statement idempotent — running it again on a database that already exists produces a warning instead of a hard error, which is essential in setup scripts run more than once.

Example: Safely Creating Databases

sql

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS shop;

Creating with Character Sets

Specifying CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 when creating a database ensures it can store the full Unicode range, including emoji and many non-Latin scripts — the older utf8 alias in MySQL is actually a 3-byte subset that can't.

Example: Creating with Character Sets

sql

CREATE DATABASE shop CHARACTER SET utf8mb4;

Specifying Collation Rules

Collation rules determine whether text comparisons and sorting are case-sensitive or accent-sensitive; picking the wrong collation for your application's language can cause search results to feel subtly wrong later.

Example: Specifying Collation Rules

sql

CREATE DATABASE shop CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci;

Viewing the Created Database

Querying INFORMATION_SCHEMA or running SHOW DATABASES afterward confirms your new database actually exists with the character set and collation you intended, catching typos before you build tables on top of it.

Example: Viewing the Created Database

sql

SHOW DATABASES;

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