Question about adding partitions to a table?

[Warrick Wilson]

I was trying figure out how to improve performance on a 5.0.22 database and ran across something talking about partitioning, and I've spent the last two hours reading the forum and the articles, etc. Sounds VERY helpful.

From what I've been reading, I keep seeing examples that having something like "PARTITION p3 VALUES LESS THAN MAXVALUE" at the end. That looks like a "catch-all" partition for anything over the previous partitions.

If I'm wanting to add a partition at a later date (in my case, I'm looking at separating logging data by months), then I'm assuming that I should NOT use the MAXVALUE partition, since one of the documentation pages says that you can only add partitions at the end. Am I understanding that right?

In a similar vein, then, if I had a table with the following partitions:

PARTITION BY RANGE( region_code ) (
PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (64),
PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (128),
PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN (192)
);

What would happen if I INSERTed a record where the region_code was 193? Does it go somewhere? Do I get an error? And if it goes into the table somehow, would it automagically get put into the proper partition if I later came along and added a partition for VALUES LESS THAN (200), say?

Thanks!