"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 is added to OneLake, and the data can be queried; the load is predominantly performed against 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 the Dataverse data as though it is inside 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) supports 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 Spart (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 Catalogs: Access data from mirrored Databricks catalogs.
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MongoDB
