Is there a SWITCH equivalent in MySQL?

[John Gagnon]

My company is looking to move from SQL Server to MySQL to use table partitioning without having to upgrade to Enterprise Edition.

We want to use table partitioning to speed inserts into a large table (hundreds of millions of rows). A couple of questions.

Q1) Can indexes be created on the partition or only across the entire row range?
Q2) Is it possible to insert data into an empty table and then "switch" this table in as a new partition into a table that uses partitioning by date? Integer is fine since we have a dateId that resolves to every date.