Open files with InnoDB

[Shlomi Noach]

Hi,

>However growing number of
>partitions will mean more files to open (a bit dependent on the
>storage engine used)

I would very much like to understand how InnoDB handles partitions. It is my understanding that InnoDB keeps using the one single huge sized ibdata1 file (at least this is what I see when I partition an InnoDB table).

So how is the storage distributed, and what is the benefit if all is still inside one file?
Perhaps I'm wrong and missed something?
If it is as I understand, the number of partitions have no effect on the number of open files, am I correct?

Thanks,
Shlomi