There is no similar UI in SQL 2005. As far as I know, licence is just a legal paper work in SQL 2005.

If I understand correctly, when you are loading current cycle data, users still need to read data from previous cycle.

Partition may be not the best solution unless you explicitly add...

How do you read data? Do you read data by time range like from 9:00 to 10:00? or just for the current cycle?

The solution can be very different based on...

I defined a federated server with dozens of distributed partitioned views before. I remember it was very easy to make mistakes when definining those partitioned views, like overlapping of check constraint....

Eddie is right, you don't need to put the where clauses in the view. They are defined in the CHECK constraint

Can you post the schema of one of the member tables?

You can use the new BULK option in OPENROWSET in sql 2005 to easily load files to database. E.g. loading the content of file C:\Test\Orders.txt to a variable:

DECLARE...

Check the bugs fixed in SP2, you will know what I mean.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=921896

I can't put SQL server 2005 in production without those fixes.

Maybe you already solved your issue. The following query works:

SELECT

DataSetRowID as RowID, VersionPersistID, XMLValues

FROM

tblDataSetValues