Following Microsoft's ELT, as opposed to ETL, approach to Data Warehouse, you sure should be able to make that work. I'd offer to test it for you, but I'm a...

Ha! I don't. Have you tried using a tally table and Jeff's queries? I haven't tested that, but it'd be my go-to.

For the load process, bump it up to a premium service tier so you have more memory and faster processing, then bump it back down when the load is done.

Have you patched your Management Studio. I'm using the 2017 version now, but I just wrote an IF script nested 10 layers deep and it's not affecting anything and I...

SSIS is the slowest way to move data into Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The fastest way is using flat files and polybase to read the files into tables. It's quite...

A full text index might help. They're mainly meant for searching within books, that sort of thing, not so much a short varchar field. You could test it to find...

Since you have a search like that, it can't possibly use any indexes, so adding one is unlikely to speed things up. At least one resulting factor is that a...

Also, it's not the IF statements that are likely causing it to slow down, it's all the additional queries validating values. EXISTS is a good way to short circuit the...