CREATE COLLECTION

The CREATE COLLECTION statement creates a collection — the layer between a workspace and its tables/views (workspace.collection.table).

Creating a collection is optional. A collection comes into existence anyway with the first table or view placed in it. This statement exists so a collection can be made ahead of its first relation, and so DROP COLLECTION has a counterpart.

Syntax

CREATE COLLECTION [ IF NOT EXISTS ] <workspace>.<collection>;

Parameters

<workspace>.<collection> — the name is always two parts. A bare name or a three-part name is rejected when the query is planned — a collection lives inside exactly one workspace, and a bare name would create it somewhere you did not name.
IF NOT EXISTS — skip the operation without error if the collection already exists, instead of failing.

Examples

Create a Collection

CREATE COLLECTION workspace.staging;

Create Only If It Does Not Exist

CREATE COLLECTION IF NOT EXISTS workspace.staging;

Notes

Requires writer or owner on the collection. This is deliberately a lower tier than DROP COLLECTION, which requires owner: creating a collection destroys nothing, dropping one does.
Without IF NOT EXISTS, creating a collection that already exists is an error.
A collection owns no storage of its own, so creating one writes no data — it registers a namespace and nothing more.
Requires a connector with a catalog to register the collection in — not every backend supports this.
CREATE SCHEMA is accepted as a synonym, matching DROP SCHEMA / DROP COLLECTION.