Rich Whiting examines the enhancements promised with Sun Microsystems slated June release of MySQL 5.1,

The new release, for example, offers faster query response times by supporting both table and index data partitioning. With partitioning, only the relevant portions of a data set need to be scanned for a query instead of the entire table or index. Such partitioning also accelerates some data storage and database maintenance operations, according to Sun.