Re: Possible to Partition Strings ?

[Phil Hildebrand]

For detailed info on the differences between a full text search and and typical character based search against a column for a subset of that string, you'll probably want to go through the docs more in detail.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-search.html

You might also post your questions directly on the full text forum:
http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?107

In general, a full text index will index all words in a column / file, etc. It will also allow for different kinds of searches that you can get in a search accross a partitioned table. It would be faster because the optimizer could still use the full text index for searching a value 'XZY' within a larger string in most cases, whereas an index (even primary key) on a partitioned table with the same search (%xzy%) would still require a full table/index scan.

Note: I'm not really a MySQL full text index expert... I'm more familiar with full text queries within SQLServer, or externally to indexers like google or fast...