ScraperWiki.select or ScraperWiki.save_sqlite first?

[GildedHonour]

If I do this

  items.each do |item|
    if ScraperWiki.select("* from swdata where ....).empty? 
       ScraperWiki.save_sqlite(["key123"], item)
     else
       puts "Skipping " + item["key123"]
     end
 end

and the db (or rather table) doesn't exist then I get an exception.

/Users/alex/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/sqlite_magic-0.0.3/lib/sqlite_magic.rb:49:in `rescue in execute': no such table: swdata (SqliteMagic::NoSuchTable)
  from /Users/alex/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/sqlite_magic-0.0.3/lib/sqlite_magic.rb:42:in `execute'
  from /Users/alex/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.1.2/gems/scraperwiki-3.0.2/lib/scraperwiki.rb:186:in `select

How can I handle that?

[henare]

PlanningAlerts does this in a very hacky way with most of our scrapers:

if (ScraperWiki.select("* from swdata where ....").empty? rescue true)
  ScraperWiki.save_sqlite(["key123"], item)
else
  puts "Skipping " + item["key123"]
end