We are testing the ONLINE partitioning process this week. But if we do it that way, it is definitely a performance hit. So we are trying to figure out how big that performance hit will be. If the performance hit is such that for 12-18 hours many things will timeout, then that is not going to work for us.

If that is the case, then we might have to do the partitioning in a 'shadow' table and just gradually build it on the side. That would lead to a 3rd table to track changes (updates) that happen in the source table while the new partitioned 'shadow' table is being constructed. Then at the end have a brief outage to sync the two tables, then rename tables to swap them.

Any other ideas? Thanks for any suggestions.

Just some background, yes it is Enterprise Edition 2008.

256 GB RAM, plenty of horsepower with the latest Netapp SAN and Cisco UCS servers.