Question

A data engineer must copy a 400 GB SQL Server source table into a Fabric Lakehouse Delta table nightly using a pipeline Copy activity. The initial runs are extremely slow because the copy executes as a single stream. The source table has a monotonically increasing integer key and no watermark requirement (full reload each night). Which configuration should the engineer apply to the Copy activity to reduce load time most effectively?

Accepted Answer

Enable dynamic range partitioning on the integer key column in the Copy activity source settings to parallelize the read

Answer

Switch the sink to Parquet files and disable Delta conversion to avoid transaction log overhead

Answer

Replace the Copy activity with a Dataflow Gen2 that uses fast copy on a single query

Answer

Increase the pipeline's timeout value and add a retry policy so the single-stream copy can complete