We considered it, and I mentioned that as an alternative in my original post: MySQL Partitioning: this was the most similar to our existing set up, since MySQL

We considered it, and I mentioned that as an alternative in my original post: MySQL Partitioning: this was the most similar to our existing set up, since MySQL internally stores the data into different tables. We decided against it because it seemed likely that it wouldn’t be much faster than our current solution (although MySQL can internally do some optimizations to make sure you only look at tables that could possibly have data you want). And it’s still the same complexity we were looking to reduce (and would further be the only database set up in our system using partitioning).