title: How do I drop a table in SQLAlchemy when I don't have a table object?
body: <p>I want to drop a table (if it exists) before writing some data in a Pandas dataframe:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def store_sqlite(in_data, dbpath = 'my.db', table = 'mytab'):
    database = sqlalchemy.create_engine('sqlite:///' + dbpath)
    ## DROP TABLE HERE
    in_data.to_sql(name = table, con = database, if_exists = 'append')
    database.close()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The SQLAlchemy documentation all points to a <code>Table.drop()</code> object - how would I create that object, or equivalently is there an alternative way to drop this table?</p>
  
  <p><strong>Note</strong> : I can't just use <code>if_exists = 'replace'</code> as the input data is actually a dict of DataFrames which I loop over - I've suppressed that code for clarity (I hope). </p>