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17.3.4 Obtaining Information About Partitions »
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17.3.3. Maintenance of Partitions

A number of table and partition maintenance tasks can be carried out using SQL statements intended for such purposes on partitioned tables in MySQL 5.1.

Table maintenance of partitioned tables can be accomplished using the statements CHECK TABLE, OPTIMIZE TABLE, ANALYZE TABLE, and REPAIR TABLE, which are supported for partitioned tables as of MySQL 5.1.27.

Also beginning with MySQL 5.1.27, you can use a number of extensions to ALTER TABLE for performing operations of this type on one or more partitions directly, as described in the following list:

  • Rebuilding partitions.  Rebuilds the partition; this has the same effect as dropping all records stored in the partition, then reinserting them. This can be useful for purposes of defragmentation.

    Example: 

    ALTER TABLE t1 REBUILD PARTITION p0, p1;

  • Optimizing partitions.  If you have deleted a large number of rows from a partition or if you have made many changes to a partitioned table with variable-length rows (that is, having VARCHAR, BLOB, or TEXT columns), you can use ALTER TABLE ... OPTIMIZE PARTITION to reclaim any unused space and to defragment the partition data file.

    Example: 

    ALTER TABLE t1 OPTIMIZE PARTITION p0, p1;

    Using OPTIMIZE PARTITION on a given partition is equivalent to running CHECK PARTITION, ANALYZE PARTITION, and REPAIR PARTITION on that partition.

  • Analyzing partitions.  This reads and stores the key distributions for partitions.

    Example: 

    ALTER TABLE t1 ANALYZE PARTITION p3;

  • Repairing partitions.  This repairs corrupted partitions.

    Example: 

    ALTER TABLE t1 REPAIR PARTITION p0,p1;

  • Checking partitions.  You can check partitions for errors in much the same way that you can use CHECK TABLE with nonpartitioned tables.

    Example: 

    ALTER TABLE trb3 CHECK PARTITION p1;

    This command will tell you if the data or indexes in partition p1 of table t1 are corrupted. If this is the case, use ALTER TABLE ... REPAIR PARTITION to repair the partition.

Note

The statements ALTER TABLE ... ANALYZE PARTITION, ALTER TABLE ... CHECK PARTITION, ALTER TABLE ... OPTIMIZE PARTITION, and ALTER TABLE ... REPAIR PARTITION were originally introduced in MySQL 5.1.5, but did not work properly and were disabled in MySQL 5.1.24. They were re-introduced in MySQL 5.1.27. (Bug#20129) The use of these partitioning-specific ALTER TABLE statements with tables which are not partitioned is not supported; beginning with MySQL 5.1.31, it is expressly disallowed. (Bug#39434)

ALTER TABLE ... REBUILD PARTITION was also introduced in MySQL 5.1.5.