ALTER TABLE Statement MySQL 5.1 and later MySQL versions, or for creating tables partitioned by  KEY  or  LINEAR KEY  on a MySQL 5.5 or later server which can be used on a MySQL 5.1 server. The table that results from using an  ALTER TABLE ... PARTITION BY  statement must follow the same rules as one created using  CREATE TABLE ... PARTITION BY . This includes the rules governing the relationship between any unique keys (including any primary key) that the table might have, and the column or columns used in the partitioning expression, as discussed in Section 24.6.1, “Partitioning Keys, Primary Keys, and Unique Keys” . The  CREATE TABLE ... PARTITION BY  rules for specifying the number of partitions also apply to  ALTER TABLE ... PARTITION BY . The  partition_definition  clause for  ALTER TABLE ADD PARTITION  supports the same options as the clause of the same name for the  CREATE TABLE  statement. (See Section 13.1.20, “CREATE TABLE Statement” , for the syntax and description.) Suppose that you have the partitioned table created as shown here: CREATE TABLE t1 ( id INT, year_col INT ) PARTITION BY RANGE (year_col) ( PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (1991), PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (1995), PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN (1999) ); ALTER TABLE t1 ADD PARTITION (PARTITION p3 VALUES LESS THAN (2002)); You can add a new partition  p3  to this table for storing values less than  2002  as follows: DROP PARTITION  can be used to drop one or more  RANGE  or  LIST  partitions. This statement cannot be used with  HASH  or  KEY  partitions; instead, use  COALESCE PARTITION  (see later in this section). Any data that was stored in the dropped partitions named in the  partition_names  list is discarded. For example, given the table  t1  defined previously, you can drop the partitions named  p0  and  p1  as shown here: DROP PARTITION  does not work with tables that use the  NDB  storage engine. See Section 24.3.1, “Management of RANGE and LIST Partitions” , and Section 23.1.7, “Known Limitations of NDB Cluster” . ADD PARTITION  and  DROP PARTITION  do not currently support  IF [NOT] EXISTS . The  DISCARD PARTITION ... TABLESPACE  and  IMPORT PARTITION ... TABLESPACE  options extend the Transportable Tablespace feature to individual  InnoDB  table partitions. Each  InnoDB  table partition has its own tablespace file ( .ibd  file). The Transportable Tablespace feature makes it easy to copy the tablespaces from a running MySQL server instance to another running instance, or to perform a Note ALTER TABLE t1 DROP PARTITION p0, p1; 2498