Subpartitioning—also known as composite partitioning—is the further division of each partition in a partitioned table. Consider the following CREATE TABLE statement:

CREATE TABLE ts (id INT, purchased DATE)
    PARTITION BY RANGE( YEAR(purchased) )
    SUBPARTITION BY HASH( TO_DAYS(purchased) )
    SUBPARTITIONS 2 (
        PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (1990),
        PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (2000),
        PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN MAXVALUE
    );

Table ts has 3 RANGE partitions. Each of these partitions—p0, p1, and p2—is further divided into 2 subpartitions. In effect, the entire table is divided into 3 * 2 = 6 partitions. However, due to the action of the PARTITION BY RANGE clause, the first 2 of these store only those records with a value less than 1990 in the purchased column.

In MySQL 5.5, it is possible to subpartition tables that are partitioned by RANGE or LIST. Subpartitions may use either HASH or KEY partitioning. This is also known as composite partitioning.

It is also possible to define subpartitions explicitly using SUBPARTITION clauses to specify options for individual subpartitions. For example, a more verbose fashion of creating the same table ts as shown in the previous example would be:

CREATE TABLE ts (id INT, purchased DATE)
    PARTITION BY RANGE( YEAR(purchased) )
    SUBPARTITION BY HASH( TO_DAYS(purchased) ) (
        PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (1990) (
            SUBPARTITION s0,
            SUBPARTITION s1
        ),
        PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (2000) (
            SUBPARTITION s2,
            SUBPARTITION s3
        ),
        PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN MAXVALUE (
            SUBPARTITION s4,
            SUBPARTITION s5
        )
    );

Some syntactical items of note are listed here:

Subpartitions can be used with especially large tables to distribute data and indexes across many disks. Suppose that you have 6 disks mounted as /disk0, /disk1, /disk2, and so on. Now consider the following example:

CREATE TABLE ts (id INT, purchased DATE)
    PARTITION BY RANGE( YEAR(purchased) )
    SUBPARTITION BY HASH( TO_DAYS(purchased) ) (
        PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (1990) (
            SUBPARTITION s0
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk0/data'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk0/idx',
            SUBPARTITION s1
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk1/data'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk1/idx'
        ),
        PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (2000) (
            SUBPARTITION s2
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk2/data'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk2/idx',
            SUBPARTITION s3
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk3/data'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk3/idx'
        ),
        PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN MAXVALUE (
            SUBPARTITION s4
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk4/data'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk4/idx',
            SUBPARTITION s5
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk5/data'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk5/idx'
        )
    );

In this case, a separate disk is used for the data and for the indexes of each RANGE. Many other variations are possible; another example might be:

CREATE TABLE ts (id INT, purchased DATE)
    PARTITION BY RANGE(YEAR(purchased))
    SUBPARTITION BY HASH( TO_DAYS(purchased) ) (
        PARTITION p0 VALUES LESS THAN (1990) (
            SUBPARTITION s0a
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk0'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk1',
            SUBPARTITION s0b
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk2'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk3'
        ),
        PARTITION p1 VALUES LESS THAN (2000) (
            SUBPARTITION s1a
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk4/data'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk4/idx',
            SUBPARTITION s1b
                DATA DIRECTORY = '/disk5/data'
                INDEX DIRECTORY = '/disk5/idx'
        ),
        PARTITION p2 VALUES LESS THAN MAXVALUE (
            SUBPARTITION s2a,
            SUBPARTITION s2b
        )
    );

Here, the storage is as follows:

The DATA DIRECTORY and INDEX DIRECTORY options are not permitted in partition definitions when the NO_DIR_IN_CREATE server SQL mode is in effect. Beginning with MySQL 5.5.5, these options are also not permitted when defining subpartitions (Bug#42954).