I saw a great question on Twitter from Frank Pachot, a developer advocate of Yugabyte. He wrote: Without thinking how your preferred database deals with it, what do you expect if:

• session 1 starts to reads table T
• session 2 drops table T
• session 1 continues to read

The choices in his poll were: session 2 waits, session 2 fails, session 1 fails, both fail. My first thought was SQL Server and the default need for session 2 to get an exclusive lock. In that case, session 2 would wait. Most people answered that same way, but then Frank posted a follow-up with a link to his blog. The answer for Yugabyte is that session 1 fails as it gets the message that the table was deleted.

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