MENU


Partitioning

A table may be divided into multiple partitions which may be stored in different directories. Partitioning allows data stored in a table to span multiple disks, and related data to be moved easily. Some queries can be optimized with partition pruning (built-in), which excludes non-matching partitions when retrieving rows that satisfy a given WHERE clause. Moreover, you may specify the specific partitions to search, for a SELECT statement.

MySQL supports only horizontal partitioning, in which different rows may be assigned to different partitions. The MERGE, CSV, or FEDERATED storage engines do not support partitioning.
To specify the storage locations, use DATA DIRECTORY and INDEX DIRECTORY. However, these two options have no effect for the InnoDB storage engine, and Windows.