One common question I get is how to use partitioning instead of MERGE tables. The process I use involves using stored procedures to create and drop partitions. This article will go over the stored procedures I use; special thanks to Roland Bouman for taking a look and giving great feedback to optimize this process.
First, a simple table, not partitioned (yet):
use test;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS my_part;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS my_part (
id int NOT NULL,
creationDate datetime NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (id,creationDate)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
In real, life there is more to the table than just id and creationDate. The most important part is that the partitioned field(s) need to be part of the primary key.