At the moment, ALTER TABLE ... REBUILD PARTITION ... results in a table lock being placed. This prevents all operations on the entire table, including operations that would obviously not touch the partition being rebuilt (i.e. where the WHERE clause explicitly specifies a value for a partitioned field that falls outside of the content of the partition being rebuilt.

It would be really useful if this full table level lock could be avoided by effectively treating each partition as a separate table for purposes of locking.