"Shortcuts in Microsoft OneLake allow you to unify your data across domains, clouds, and accounts by creating a single virtual data lake for your entire enterprise." MS Learn
It allows open storage-format data to be stored in the source system, metadata to be added to OneLake, and the data to be queried. The load is primarily applied to the source system (e.g., Dataverse/Dynamics).
Clarification: A shortcut is automatically added to MS Fabric for each Dataverse. Dataverse creates Parquet files (est 5-10% extra data storage, counts against Dataverse storage). Via the shortcut, report writers or data engineers can access Dataverse data as if it were within MS Fabric's OneLake.
Understand: Dataverse creates Parquet files that MS Fabric can look at to generate dataset data.
"Shortcuts are objects in OneLake that point to other storage locations." MS Learn
External shortcuts (data is held at the source system) support any open format storage format, including:
- Apache Iceberg Tables via Snowflake,
- Parquet files on SnowFlake,
- Microsoft Dataverse,
- Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS),
- Google Cloud Storage,
- Databricks,
- Amazon S3 (including Iceberg tables),
- Apache Spark (Iceberg)
- SQL Databases: Connect to SQL databases within the Fabric environment.
- Lakehouses: Reference data within different lakehouses.
- Warehouses: Reference data stored in data warehouses.
- Kusto Query Language (KQL) Databases: Connect to data stored in KQL databases.
- Mirrored Azure Databricks Catalogues: Access data from mirrored Databricks catalogues.
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MongoDB
Example High-Level Architecture
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| External shortcuts with Snowflake and Dataverse. |
