Question

As I am a MySQL newbie. What does PARTITION mean in this MySQL statement?

CREATE TABLE employees (
    id INT NOT NULL,
    fname VARCHAR(30),
    lname VARCHAR(30),
    hired DATE NOT NULL DEFAULT '1970-01-01',
    separated DATE NOT NULL DEFAULT '9999-12-31',
    job_code INT NOT NULL,
    store_id INT NOT NULL
)
PARTITION BY RANGE (store_id) (
    PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (6),
    PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (11),
    PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN (16),
    PARTITION p3 VALUES LESS THAN (21)
);

Answer 1

Partitioning is a way of
pre-organizing table storage. You can
say “some of the table’s rows will go
here, some will go there, still others
will go to to still other places”.
Often, depending on the storage
engine, the effect is to spread the
table’s rows over different files or
even different disks.

From: MySQL 5.1 New Features: MySQL Partitions

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You may also be interested in seeking further information on “horizontal partitioning“, in order to better understand the scenarios where this is particularly useful.