Determine table category:

• Fact tables
• Dimension tables
• Integration tables

Table persistence:

Tables store data either permanently in Azure Storage, temporarily in Azure Storage, or in a data store external to SQL pool.

• Regular table
• Temporary table
• External table

Distributed tables:

• Hash-distributed tables
• Replicated tables
• Round-robin tables

Table partitions:

A partitioned table stores and performs operations on the table rows according to data ranges. For example, a table could be partitioned by day, month, or year. You can improve query performance through partition elimination, which limits a query scan to data within a partition. You can also maintain the data through partition switching.

Columnstore Indexes:

• By default, SQL pool stores a table as a clustered columnstore index. This form of data storage achieves high data compression and query performance on large tables.
• The clustered columnstore index is usually the best choice, but in some cases a clustered index or a heap is the appropriate storage structure.

Statistics:

• The query optimizer uses column-level statistics when it creates the plan for executing a query.
• To improve query performance, it’s important to have statistics on individual columns, especially columns used in query joins. Creating statistics happens automatically.