Often when working with database you need to check for existence of tables and indexes and validate their structure. Unlike MySQL, SQLite does not have native API for this purpose, so you need to execute queries to fetch this information by yourself.

In SQLite table structure is stored inside two internal tables, sqlite_master for regular tables and sqlite_temp_master for temporary ones and is represented by 4 columns.

type

Indicates whether the current entity is a table, index or something else.

name

Name of the entity, such as table or index name.

tbl_name

The name of the table the current entity affects. For tables this is the same as name.

sql

The SQL query needed to create the current entity. For tables this will contain the complete CREATE TABLE query.