Michael J. Swart provides an update:
This is an update to my post last week Partitioning a Huge Table where I talk about taking an existing table and making it partitioned.
My largest complaint in that post was that it was difficult to do online because rebuilding a clustered index on a huge table required reading or writing a lot of data.
Also if I wanted to take advantage of partition switching, it was still tricky because it required adding a check constraint which also took a long amount of time.Was there any way to adopt partitioned tables for huge tables without incurring a size-of-data operation? I invited people to leave their ideas in the comments. A reader who calls himself mmiike delivered.
Click through for the answer.