What is MYSQL Partitioning?

Question

I have read the documentation (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/partitioning.html), but I would like, in your own words, what it is and why it is used.

1. Is

Answer 1

A partitioned table is a single logical table that’s composed of multiple physical subtables. The partitioning code is really just a wrapper around a set of Handler objects that represent the underlying partitions, and it forwards requests to the storage engine through the Handler objects. Partitioning is a kind of black box that hides the underlying partitions from you at the SQL layer, although you can see them quite easily by looking at the filesystem, where you’ll see the component tables with a hash-delimited naming convention.

For example, here’s a simple way to place each year’s worth of sales into a separate partition:

CREATE TABLE sales (
 order_date DATETIME NOT NULL,
 -- Other columns omitted
) ENGINE=InnoDB PARTITION BY RANGE(YEAR(order_date)) (
 PARTITION p_2010 VALUES LESS THAN (2010),
 PARTITION p_2011 VALUES LESS THAN (2011),
 PARTITION p_2012 VALUES LESS THAN (2012),
 PARTITION p_catchall VALUES LESS THAN MAXVALUE );

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