Partitioning tables

You can distribute portions of individual tables across a filesystem using partitions. The user-selected rule by which the division of data is accomplished is known as a partitioning function, which can be modulus, simple matching against a set of ranges or value lists, an internal hashing function, or a linear hashing function.

Different rows of a table may be assigned to different physical partitions, which is called horizontal partitioning. MySQL does not have support for vertical partitioning, in which different columns of a table are assigned to different physical partitions.

There are many ways to partition a table:

• RANGE: This type of partitioning assigns rows to partitions based on column values falling within a given range.
• LIST: Similar to partitioning by RANGE, except that the partition is selected based on columns matching one of a set of discrete values.
• HASH: With this type of partitioning, a partition is selected based on the value returned by a user-defined...