Tim,

Yes the MIN/MAX rewrite rule is still broken in 2008 that is true - don't know anyone with R2 to test it there though.

The parallelism thing really made partitioning just about useless on 2005 for non-OLTP stuff. All very sad.

Never yet encountered partitioning on a super-high-volume OLTP system - the ones I've encountered used local partitioned views instead, for a variety of reasons.

Paul