Honestly i wouldn't call it "common". It's useful, and if it existed I could see it changing how I design a database, but it's not something I can say i've ever thought about needing before.
Its very common to partition by a function of a date, e.g. `PARTITION BY RANGE( DAY(event_timestamp) )` etc. The docs talk a lot about partitioning by dates http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/partitioning-range.ht... but, as said, you have to have a cron job to keep adding new partitions and archiving/dropping old partitions etc. Its a shame that couldn't be automated by the DB itself.
But then again, maybe i'm the outlier here.