(I'm a coworker of the OP) We discussed using MySQL partitions but decided we would rather avoid them if possible. That may have been in part an over-reaction t

(I'm a coworker of the OP) We discussed using MySQL partitions but decided we would rather avoid them if possible. That may have been in part an over-reaction to the pain of dealing with our application-level partitioning, but it was also in part because we don't have a dedicated DBA, which means one of us developer types has to re-learn the quirks of MySQL every time we touch it.