How to check if a table exists in Hive?

Execute the following command : show tables in DB like 'TABLENAME'
If the table exists, its name will be returned, otherwise nothing will be returned.
This is done directly from hive. for more options see this.

DB is the database in which you want to see if the table exists.
TABLENAME is the table name you seek,

What actually happens is that Hive queries its metastore (depends on your configuration but it can be in a standard RDBMS like MySQL) so you can optionally connect directly to the same metastore and write your own query to see if the table exists.

There are two approaches by which you can check that:

1.) As @dimamah suggested, just to add one point here, for this approach you need to

 1.1) start the **hiveserver** before running the query
 1.2) you have to run two queries
      1.2.1) USE <database_name>
      1.2.2) SHOW TABLES LIKE 'table_name'
      1.2.3) Then you check your result using Result set.

2.) Second approach is to use HiveMetastoreClient APIs, where you can directly use the APIs to check whether the table_name exist in a particular database or not.

For further help please go through this Hive 11