Microsoft just released a community technological preview for the next release of SQL Server. Download…
At last Microsoft released a SQL Server edition that supports online rebuild of a single index partition! In previous version you have been able to rebuild the whole index online, but not a single partion. If you have a very large table that is partitioned it takes a very long time to rebuild the whole index, but it takes less time to rebuild a smaller partition but if you can’t rebuild the partition online, you’ll block other processes that tries to read or write to the table.
Rebuilding indexes and partitions online is an Enterprise feature.