I'm working on a database with mysql 5.0 for an open source project it's used to stored sentences in specific languages and their translations in other languages I used to have a big table "sentences" and "sentences_translations" (use to join sentences to sentences) table but has we have now near one million entries, this begin to be a bit slow, moreover, most of request are made using a "where lang =" so I've decided to create a table by language sentences_LANGUAGECODE and sentences_translation_LANGSOURCE_LANGTARGET and to create merge table like this sentences_ENG_OTHERS which merge sentences_ENG_ARA sentences_ENG_DEU etc... when we want to have the translations in all languages of an english sentence sentences_OTHERS_ENG when we want to have only the english translations of some sentences I've created a script to create all these tables (they're around 31 languages so more than 60 merge table), I've tested, that works really great a request which use to take 160ms now take only 30 :) but I discover that all my merge table after the 15th use to have "NULL" as type of storage engine instead of MRG_MYISAM, and if delete one, then I can create an others, using FLUSH table between each creation also allow me to create more merge tables so is this a limitation from mysql ? can we override it ? thanks for your answers