Statistics are saved on table level and not on partition level (both SQL 2005 & 2008
Currently table statistics and histograms are saved per table and not per table partition. Many environments that i see experience real performance degradation when migrating from view partitions to native partitions because, thanks to partition elimination, we never work on table level and always on partition level so statistics that exist only on table level give wrong estimations when data spread not equally between partitions, for instance, when some value appears a lot in one partition and only once in another, estimations for partition where the value appears once are bad. I see this behavior in both SQL 2005 and I was sure that this will be changed in SQL 2008 but the behavior stayed the same.