Partitioning

User-defined partitioning (refer to http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/partitioning.html) is offered in MySQL 5.1. It allows us to "distribute portions of individual tables across a file system according to rules which you can set largely as needed". Using this feature in phpMyAdmin requires knowledge of its syntax as there are many partition types. Also, for each partition type, the number of partitions and the values associated with each partition are too random to be easily represented on a web interface.

Creating a table with partitions

Let us try it by creating a table named test with one column id. On the table creation panel, if connected to a MySQL 5.1 server, phpMyAdmin shows a PARTITION definition dialog, as shown in the following screenshot:

Here, we enter a PARTITION BY RANGE clause, which will create partitions on the id column:

PARTITION BY RANGE (id) (
  PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (1000),
  PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (2000),
  PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN...