How to create a shortcut in a Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse

João Barros 04 de July de 2026 4 min read

OneLake shortcuts let you reference data stored somewhere else — such as Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Amazon S3 or another Lakehouse — directly inside your Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse, without copying or duplicating a single file. This avoids stale copies, saves storage and always works against the latest version of the data. The steps below show how to create a shortcut in a Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse in just a few minutes.

Prerequisites

A Microsoft Fabric workspace with active capacity (the free trial works).
A Lakehouse already created in that workspace.
Access to the data source: for example, an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account with a container, or another Lakehouse in the same tenant.
Permission to authenticate against the source (organizational account, account key, SAS or service principal).

Step 1: Open the Lakehouse and start a new shortcut

In your workspace, open the Lakehouse where you want the shortcut. The explorer on the left shows two areas: Tables and Files. Hover over the area where you want the shortcut, click the three dots (...) and choose New shortcut. Put the shortcut under Files for raw data (CSV, Parquet, folders) or under Tables if the source is already a Delta table.

How to create a shortcut in a Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse

Step 2: Choose the source — OneLake or external

The New shortcut window offers two groups of sources. Microsoft OneLake points to data in another Lakehouse or Warehouse within the same tenant. The external sources include Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage and Dataverse, among others. Pick the option that matches where the data lives today.

A shortcut is just a pointer: the data is never moved or copied. If the file changes at the source, the change is immediately visible in the Lakehouse.

Step 3: Create a shortcut to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Select Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. In the URL field, enter the DFS endpoint of your storage account, in the format:

https://youraccount.dfs.core.windows.net

Next, create or pick a connection and the authentication method — for example, organizational account, account key or SAS. Once connected, browse to the container and folder you want to expose, give the shortcut a name (for example, vendas_externas) and confirm. The shortcut appears as a folder under Files, but the data still lives in the ADLS account.

Step 4: Create an internal shortcut with OneLake

To reuse data that is already in Fabric, choose Microsoft OneLake in the shortcut window. Select the source Lakehouse or Warehouse, browse to the table or folder you need and confirm. This is the ideal way to share a gold table across teams without duplicating it: every project reads the same data from a single source of truth.

Verify the result

After you create the shortcut, it appears in the Lakehouse explorer as a folder (under Files) or as a table (under Tables). To confirm the data is readable, open a notebook attached to the Lakehouse and read the shortcut's relative path:

df = spark.read.parquet("Files/vendas_externas/")
df.show(5)

If the source is a Delta table placed under Tables, you can query it straight away through the Lakehouse SQL analytics endpoint:

SELECT TOP 10 * FROM vendas_externas;

Seeing the returned rows confirms that the shortcut is set up correctly and with the right permissions.

Conclusion

With a OneLake shortcut, data from several sources is now reachable from a single Lakehouse — without copying it and always up to date. From here, try combining several shortcuts into a star schema, or connect the SQL analytics endpoint to Power BI to build reports in Direct Lake mode. Which data source in your organization would make the most sense to expose through a shortcut first?