We've used various partitioning schemes at Causes (I'm a coworker of the OP) but for this particular use case the monthly tables weren't a good fit. (Your comm

We've used various partitioning schemes at Causes (I'm a coworker of the OP) but for this particular use case the monthly tables weren't a good fit. (Your comment about automatic/transparent makes me think you're probably thinking of merge tables. We've used those too for other models, but we're not big fans of them because they require you to use the MyISAM storage engine, which doesn't offer the same consistency guarantees that InnoDB does.) In this particular instance, a single large table with the right indices gives better performance and, importantly for us, speeds up developers by removing unnecessary complexity.