MySQL 5.1 (which is in beta right now btw) will have an interesting new feature called partitioning which will allow for a bit more scalability in certain situations. You can read more about it here, here, and here.
I don't see this really being much of an advantage in practice. Most people want to scale their database in terms of transactions per second. You could buy three disks and put a partition on each or you could put the whole thing on a stripped RAID array. Each would have the same IO characteristics (assuming your …
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