There are some business and potentially legal reasons behind the decision. I have not personally used partitioning but I know what it is and I'll brush up on the topic to see if it can help. But to make a long story short if our system gets large enough we can dynamically add a new database and auto-magically start loading data onto it,even if that db is on another physical server. So it's not quite the same as partitioning. Its more like home grown load balancing for data.