What are OneLake shortcuts?

OneLake Shortcuts are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Fabric. If your data is already stored in Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or another supported location, it does not need to be copied into OneLake. A shortcut creates a reference to the source data, making it available across Microsoft Fabric experiences such as Power BI and Data Science without creating duplicate copies. 

Microsoft Fabric FAQs

  What is OneLake?

OneLake is a single, central location for storing and managing business data, enabling consistent use across reporting, analytics, AI, and other Fabric workloads. It is the data foundation for Microsoft Fabric, unifying and securing data, making it ready for discovery, all in one place. 

  How many OneLake instances can I have in a Fabric tenant?

One per tenant. 

Every Microsoft Fabric tenant automatically includes a single OneLake. You cannot create additional OneLake instances within that tenant. Instead, data is organised within OneLake using workspaces, domains, lakehouses, databases and other Fabric items.  

Organisations with regional data residency requirements can deploy Fabric capacities in different geographic regions using Multi-Geo, allowing data to remain within designated locations while still part of a unified OneLake architecture. 

  Why do I need Fabric Databases if I already have OneLake?

Databases and OneLake solve different problems.  

OneLake is the shared storage layer, within a central location where enterprise data is stored and shared across Fabric workloads. Data is unified from different business systems into OneLake, prepared and secured, ready for use for reporting and analytics.  

A Fabric Database is a Fabric storage item intended for transactional or operational application data within the Fabric ecosystem. It is suitable for specific use cases where app-style operational or relational transaction workloads are required. 

  What are OneLake shortcuts?

OneLake Shortcuts are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Fabric. If your data is already stored in Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or another supported location, it does not need to be copied into OneLake. A shortcut creates a reference to the source data, making it available across Microsoft Fabric experiences such as Power BI and Data Science without creating duplicate copies.