Data Platform Tips 81 - Azure Synapse Analytics - Distribution Strategies

Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly known as Azure SQL Data Warehouse) uses three ways to distribute data. A distribution is the basic unit of storage and processing for parallel queries that run on distributed data. When SQL Analytics runs a query, the work is divided into 60 smaller queries that run in parallel using massively parallel processing (MPP) engine.

• Round robin
• Hashing
• Replication

Round robin: Data is spread evenly among all the 60 underlying distributions without any regard to data values. There is no specific key used to distribute data.

Hashing: Most common and effective data distribution method. Data is distributed according to the most common distributed according to the value of a selected column.


Replication: Data is copied to every database rather than being split up. Replication is good small lookup tables or dimension tables that are frequently joined with other big tables.