Re: Difference between using Merge vs. symbolic-links approach?

[KimSeong Loh]

For 1, I am not aware of this limitation, I have to check.

For 2, I suspect if you do a simple view like select * from anothertable, this should be using the ALGORITHM=MERGE instead of TEMPTABLE, MERGE algorithm should be able to reuse the indexes in the underlying table. With TEMPTABLE algorithm the indexes of the underlying table is only used to generate the view result, cannot be used on the actual query, so fulltext index is not usable here.
If you do UNION of multiple tables in the view, the algorithm could be TEMPTABLE.
Anyway, I have not done fulltext in this manner, so cannot be sure.