We have an application with a table with 20+ columns that are all searchable. Building indexes for all these columns would make write queries very slow; and any really useful index would often have to be across multiple columns increasing the number of indexes needed.

However, for 95% of these searches, only a small subset of those rows need to be searched upon, and quite a small number - say 50,000 rows.

So, we have considered using mySQL Partition tables - having a column that is basically isActive which is what we divide the two partitions by. Most search queries would be run with isActive=1. Most queries would then be run against the small 50,000 row partition and be quick without other indexes.

Only issue is the rows where isActive=1 is not fixed; i.e. it's not based on the date of the row or anything fixed like that; we will need to update isActive based on use of the data in that row. As I understand it that is no problem though; the data would just be moved from one partition to another during the UPDATE query.

We do have a PK on id for the row though; and I am not sure if this is a problem; the manual seemed to suggest the partition had to be based on any primary keys. This would be a huge problem for us because the primary key ID has no basis on whether the row isActive.