Management of RANGE and LIST Partitions +------+-------------+------------+ 2 rows in set (0.00 sec) mysql>  SELECT * FROM tr PARTITION (p2); +------+-------------+------------+ | id | name | purchased | +------+-------------+------------+ | 2 | alarm clock | 1997-11-05 | | 10 | lava lamp | 1998-12-25 | +------+-------------+------------+ 2 rows in set (0.00 sec) mysql>  SHOW CREATE TABLE tr\G *************************** 1. row *************************** Table: tr Create Table: CREATE TABLE ‘tr‘ ( ‘id‘ int(11) DEFAULT NULL, 4688 If you now execute a  SHOW CREATE TABLE  statement, you can see how the partitioning makeup of the table has been changed: If you intend to change the partitioning of a table  without  losing data, use  ALTER TABLE ... REORGANIZE PARTITION  instead. See below or in Section 13.1.9, “ALTER TABLE Statement” , for information about  REORGANIZE PARTITION . If you wish to drop all data from all partitions while preserving the table definition and its partitioning scheme, use the  TRUNCATE TABLE  statement. (See Section 13.1.37, “TRUNCATE TABLE Statement” .) Because of this, you must have the  DROP  privilege for a table before you can execute  ALTER TABLE ... DROP PARTITION  on that table. DROP PARTITION  is supported by native partitioning in-place APIs and may be used with  ALGORITHM={COPY|INPLACE} .  DROP PARTITION  with ALGORITHM=INPLACE  deletes data stored in the partition and drops the partition. However,  DROP PARTITION  with  ALGORITHM=COPY  or  old_alter_table=ON rebuilds the partitioned table and attempts to move data from the dropped partition to another partition with a compatible  PARTITION ... VALUES  definition. Data that cannot be moved to another partition is deleted. Note It is very important to remember that,  when you drop a partition, you also delete all the data that was stored in that partition . You can see that this is the case by re-running the previous  SELECT  query: The  NDBCLUSTER  storage engine does not support  ALTER TABLE ... DROP PARTITION . It does, however, support the other partitioning-related extensions to ALTER TABLE  that are described in this chapter. To drop the partition named  p2 , execute the following command: See Section 24.5, “Partition Selection” , for more information. You can also get this information using partition selection, as shown here: mysql>  SELECT * FROM tr WHERE purchased ->  BETWEEN ’1995-01-01’ AND ’1999-12-31’; Empty set (0.00 sec) mysql>  ALTER TABLE tr DROP PARTITION p2; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec) Note