A first table partitioning exercise.

[patrick flaherty]

Experienced programmer but without a lot of MySql experience.

This seemed like a good exercise to try out table partitioning in MySql:

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/performance-partitioning.html

A time difference of an order of magnitude (3.88 partitioned sec vs 38.30 sec) seems pretty compelling.

So I go through exactly the same exercise and get:

(unpartitioned) 5.09 sec vs (partitioned) 3.82 sec.

Partitioned matches closely but unpartitioned has come way down. Why? I would guess because I'm using a fairly recent version of 5.5 whereas the exercise was written for 5.1 and various things have occurred to considerably improve the unpartitioned performance between 5.1 and 5.5?

I wonder what those things might be (provided I'm correct of course)? And it would be useful to have an example that better demonstrates differences between partitioned and unpartitioned for 5.5 (?).