26.2.3 COLUMNS Partitioning

The next two sections discuss COLUMNS partitioning, which are variants on RANGE and LIST partitioning. COLUMNS partitioning enables the use of multiple columns in partitioning keys. All of these columns are taken into account both for the purpose of placing rows in partitions and for the determination of which partitions are to be checked for matching rows in partition pruning.

In addition, both RANGE COLUMNS partitioning and LIST COLUMNS partitioning support the use of non-integer columns for defining value ranges or list members. The permitted data types are shown in the following list:

All integer types: TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, INT (INTEGER), and BIGINT. (This is the same as with partitioning by RANGE and LIST.)
Other numeric data types (such as DECIMAL or FLOAT) are not supported as partitioning columns.
DATE and DATETIME.
Columns using other data types relating to dates or times are not supported as partitioning columns.
The following string types: CHAR, VARCHAR, BINARY, and VARBINARY.
TEXT and BLOB columns are not supported as partitioning columns.

The discussions of RANGE COLUMNS and LIST COLUMNS partitioning in the next two sections assume that you are already familiar with partitioning based on ranges and lists as supported in MySQL 5.1 and later; for more information about these, see Section 26.2.1, “RANGE Partitioning”, and Section 26.2.2, “LIST Partitioning”, respectively.