General availability: Replicated tables in Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Published date: April 26, 2018
Replicated tables are now generally available in Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
On enterprise data warehouses, query performance gets bogged down with high amounts of data movement when tables are distributed differently and joined together. A new table distribution type called Replicate is available in Azure SQL Data Warehouse. You can use it to reduce data movement by making data available on all compute nodes. Queries that were once plagued with inefficient data movement can now run much faster.
Replicated tables are ideal for small star-schema dimension tables, because the fact table is often distributed on a column that is not compatible with the connected dimension tables. If this case applies to your schema, consider changing small dimension tables currently implemented as round-robin to replicated.
For more information, see the full blog post.