Okay ... too much going on in a single post, let me pick one...
Anye Mercy (7/13/2010)
Is partitioning something that could help me?
Partitioning is usually implemented to help in administrative tasks like archiving and purging, also to improve query performance when queries have to retrieve a large number of rows in a table storing atomic data.
Having said that... are those candidate-tables 100M rows in size and growing?
If the answer is No... chances are partitioning is not going to help.
Last but not least, you can implement "poor's man partitioning" in Standard Edition, nothing but a hand made bunch of tables (one "per partition") with an umbrella view on top of them.
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Pablo (Paul) Berzukov
Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.
Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.