Very Large Number Of Rows

We are busy designing a generic analytical system at work that will
hold multiple analytic types over time. This system is being developed
in SQL 2000.

Example of table
IDENTITY int
ItemId int [PK]
AnalyticType int [PK]
AnalyticDate DateTime [PK]
Value numeric(28,15)

ItemId - the item for which the analytic is being stored
AnalyticType - an arbitrary type

The [PK] tag indicates the composite primary key.

Our scenario is the following:
* For this time series data, we expect around 250 days per year
(working days) and the dataset could extend to over 20 years
* Up to 50 analytic types
* Up to 20,000 items

Looking at the combined calculation - this comes to roughly something
like
25 * 20,000 * 50 * 250 or around 5 billion rows.

We will be inserting around 50*20,000 or around 1 million rows each day
(the inserts will take place in the middle of the night (outside the
main query time) - this could be done through something like BCP or
BULK INSERT.

Our real problem is we have not previously worked with such large
tables before and are nervous that our system is going to grind to a
halt. Our biggest tables are around 20 million rows at the moment.

Scanning through google and microsoft's own site we have found a
parititioning method that is available.
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...art5/c1861.mspx
Having experimented with the above system it seems rather quirky and
looking at the available literature it seems that this is not more
effective than a clustered index as far as queries go.

It needs to be optimized for queries like:
Given the ItemID and the AnalyticType search for a specific date or a
specific range of dates.

If anyone has any experience or helpful suggestions I would really
appreciate it.

Thanks

A