Partitioning The advantage of partitioning is that we can drop / truncate the partitions which is real quick and done in seconds. It does lock the table (metadata lock) during this operation but only for few seconds. That duration depends on the number of pages in use in the buffer pool. With MySQL 5.6 it is possible to exchange the partitions , which helps in moving archived data to another table with similar structure.
   
Fully Automated archival / purge 

Consider a fast growing table which is partitioned to help the queries and help quick archival/purge. The queries if specify the partitioning filter can limit the search to relevant partitions and can considerably reduce the query time. Purging old data to reclaim the storage space can be readily achieved by truncating the old partitions. Archival has multiple techniques but with MySQL 5.6 exchanging the partitions make archival a real …