You can achieve a similar result using Standard and views should your budget not stretch to Enterprise. Really it's horses for courses, if you databases are large enough to warrant partitioning, then the other features that come with Enterprise (for instance compression, resource governing, rebuild indexes online) are probably essential too. I phased Enterprise out here due to cost/features benefit was not stacking up (databases are typically small, largest is less than 100GB). However, now need to deal with some big data (about 30 million rows per week) and as such to be assured that we can provide the data services required, Enterprise had to be figured into the budget.