Overview of Partitioning in MySQL Several types of partitioning are supported, as well as subpartitioning; see Section 24.2, “Partitioning Types” , and Section 24.2.6, “Subpartitioning” . Section 24.3, “Partition Management” , covers methods of adding, removing, and altering partitions in existing partitioned tables. Section 24.3.4, “Maintenance of Partitions” , discusses table maintenance commands for use with partitioned tables. The  PARTITIONS  table in the  INFORMATION_SCHEMA  database provides information about partitions and partitioned tables. See Section 26.3.21, “The INFORMATION_SCHEMA PARTITIONS Table” , for more information; for some examples of queries against this table, see Section 24.2.7, “How MySQL Partitioning Handles NULL” . For known issues with partitioning in MySQL 8.0, see Section 24.6, “Restrictions and Limitations on Partitioning” . You may also find the following resources to be useful when working with partitioned tables. Additional Resources.   Other sources of information about user-defined partitioning in MySQL include the following: This is the official discussion forum for those interested in or experimenting with MySQL Partitioning technology. It features announcements and updates from MySQL developers and others. It is monitored by members of the Partitioning Development and Documentation Teams. MySQL Partitioning Architect and Lead Developer Mikael Ronström frequently posts articles here concerning his work with MySQL Partitioning and NDB Cluster. A MySQL news site featuring MySQL-related blogs, which should be of interest to anyone using my MySQL. We encourage you to check here for links to blogs kept by those working with MySQL Partitioning, or to have your own blog added to those covered. This section provides a conceptual overview of partitioning in MySQL 8.0. For information on partitioning restrictions and feature limitations, see Section 24.6, “Restrictions and Limitations on Partitioning” . The SQL standard does not provide much in the way of guidance regarding the physical aspects of data storage. The SQL language itself is intended to work independently of any data structures or media underlying the schemas, tables, rows, or columns with which it works. Nonetheless, most advanced database management systems have evolved some means of determining the physical location to be used for storing specific pieces of data in terms of the file system, hardware or even both. In MySQL, the  InnoDB  storage engine has long supported the notion of a tablespace (see Section 15.6.3, “Tablespaces” ), and the MySQL Server, even prior to the introduction of partitioning, could be configured to employ different physical directories for storing different databases (see Section 8.12.2, “Using Symbolic Links” , for an explanation of how this is done). Partitioning  takes this notion a step further, by enabling you to distribute portions of individual tables across a file system according to rules which you can set largely as needed. In effect, different portions of a table 4656 •MySQL Partitioning Forum •Mikael Ronström’s Blog •PlanetMySQL 24.1 Overview of Partitioning in MySQL