Overview: Snowflake covers a small area of what Fabric does. But Snowflake cover it's area unbelievably well. For large enterprises use these together even though there is some overlap, Snowflake is great at what it does!
Five ways to use Snowflake data in Fabric:
1. ETL - use Data Factory or an ETL tool to copy data from Snowflake to Fabrics OneLake (point in time copy). This should be your last option.
2. Direct query (no copy) - Fabric compute (Power BI, Notebooks, Dataflows, Pipelines) runs queries directly against Snowflake’s SQL endpoint. Best when you want zero‑copy and Snowflake stays the system of record.
3. Mirroring (copy + sync) - Fabric mirrors a Snowflake database using CDC into OneLake so Fabric can work locally with governed, accelerated data while staying synced with Snowflake. Good for small and commonly accessed data.
4. Shortcut to Snowflake‑hosted Iceberg (no data copy) - Fabric creates a Shortcut (virtual pointer) to Iceberg tables stored with Snowflake, so Fabric tools read them without moving data.
5. Snowflake writes Iceberg to OneLake - Like option 3 but Snowflake handle the outbound - Snowflake materializes Iceberg tables into a OneLake location; Fabric then reads them natively (open‑format interop).
