Yes, you are right and i would appreciate to have comments from everyone and get idea which one will best suite in my scenario mentioned above.

We actually want to keep our Operational/online DB light as much as possible. Also the online database will be part of Peer to Peer Replication with other SQL Servers. I read some articles on replication with partition with some restrictions so i did not spend much time on that. If i get ideas from more guys who recommend partitioning would be best and cover my scenarios mentioned above including P2P replication support with improved high availablitity / high performance - I will definitely research and start development on it.

Thanks.

Shamshad Ali.