First of all, you say that the partitioning was so that you could achieve parallelism in your ETL loads to the staging table.  You also state that the partitioned was...

I came across this article after about 50 views, according the stats on the website.  At that time, this article only had about 3 stars.  Considering all the great comments...

When writing articles or even presentations, I've found that demonstrating a "bad" way saves on a huge number of questions (and, contrary to popular belief, there is such a thing as...

p.s.  Kick the slats off that DBA.  (S)he should bloody well know better not to develop in production and that code should be thoroughly tested prior to deployment to production.

BTW... please post the 2 functions.  I'm always interested in reporting functions and have some old "Black Arts" tricks that might provide additional performance benefits.

My take on it is that "It Depends".  If it was an optimization made by the DBAs, then the DBAs are responsible for proving identical functionality and results.  As a...