Currently a table is limited to the operation system file size. On Linux the current limit is 2G, on Solaris 2.5.1 the limit is 4G and on Solaris 2.6 the limit is going to be 1000G. To get more that 4G requires some changes to MySQL that are on the Todo. See section List of things we want to add to MySQL in the future (The TODO)..
If your big table is going to be read_only, you could use pack_isam (See section The MySQL compressed read only table generator) to merge and compress many tables to one. As pack_isam usually compresses a table by at least 50%, you can have much bigger tables.
Another solution can be the included MERGE library, which allows one to handle a collection of identical tables as one. Currently MERGE can only be used to scan a collection of tables because it doesn't support indexes. We will add indexes to this in the near future. Identical in this case means that all tables are created with identical column information.
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