Partitioning Details

[Steven Roussey]

I was wondering about some details on how Mysql is going to handle individual partitions. We do our own in-application poor mans version of partitioning for two reasons: table locking and table maintanence. In a partitioned table, will there still be table locking, or will it lock just a partition? Or will there be row-level-locking at that time that makes my question meaningless? And will we be able to do maintanence on a table one partition at a time, or will it require the whole table to be locked up? In this context, I mean something like OPTIMIZE TABLE or ALTER TABLE ... ORDER BY on a partition.

Thanks!