When you work with large tables in SQL Server 2005 and 2008, you will inevitably start using partitioned tables in order to ease the maintenance of these tables, and improve query performance. I recently wanted to merge several partitions at the tail of an existing partition function, and I wanted to understand whether I need to merge the partitions in a sequential order from the last partition and work my way up the chain of partitions, or would it be better to start from the newest partition (that...