Re: @diodesign
I was too busy today to write my own diatribe, but the fact of the mater is that SQLServer is pretty piss poor at a lot of things.
SSIS (like DTS before it) is abysmal for anything beyond trivial, and even then it borks often.
To describe the optimizer as severely challenged, is as polite as I get. When you throw partitions into the mix, the optimization results are more often table scans than not. Add a few @vars in the predicate to spice up your life.
And don't start me on statistical drift ... brain dead statistics are a major pain and the optimizer relies on them and some hard coded values in the algorithms targeted at toy databases (which SQLServer still is).
I could go on about broken queries returning wrong data, broken internal structures never repaired, broken data type conversions etc etc.
Time for bed, enough fighting with this for today.
pjl