Hash-distributed tables improve query performance on large fact tables. Columnstore indexes can achieve up to 100x better performance on analytics and data warehousing workloads and up to 10x better data compression than traditional rowstore indexes. Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-data-warehouse/sql-data-warehouse-tables-distribute https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/indexes/columnstore-indexes-query-performance