Obtaining the next partition number For a partitioned table, how do I determine via T-SQL what is the next partition number that will be used?  For example, the switch-in today went into partition number 50.  I want to build the new switch-in table to contain the boundary values for partition number 51. I'm currently doing this manually and want to automate it via stored procedures. I'm using SQL Server 2012.
There are a few good DMVs (system views) where you can find this info: sys.partition_functions and sys.partition_schemes can be joined to sys.partition_range_values to get all existing ranges. The number of ranges should be the number of partitions.

The data_space_id of the partition scheme can be joined to that of the index or heap in sys.indexes on the table (sys.tables) that you're interested in.