What is the best way to store historical data in SQL Server 2005/2008?

Question

My simplified and contrived example is the following:-

Lets say that I want to measure and store the temperature (and other values) of all the worlds\' towns on a daily

Answer 1

it DEPENDS on the applications usage patterns... If usage patterns indicate that the historical data will be queried more often than the current values, then put them all in one table... But if Historical queries are the exception, (or less than 10% of the queries), and the performance of the more common current value query will suffer from putting all data in one table, then it makes sense to separate that data into it's own table...