Fun with partitions and MyISAM, part #2

This is part of the reply i got on my bug report on the ALTER TABLE issue with MyISAM and a large number of partitions from my previous post:

This is a design limitation, MyISAM have one file handle open for the .MYI file shared by all instances of one table, and one file handle open for each table instance for the .MYD file. And the ha_partition generic partitioning engine always open all partitions when opening a table/handler.

So this should not only affect ALTER TABLE but all operations on MyISAM tables with large number of partitions should eventually run into this. Lets try and see what happens ...