Forum Discussion
Lakehouse - Shortcut questions
I have three questions about shortcuts in a lakehouse:
- If a shortcut has a hyphen in the name, it will automatically be put in the "Unidentified" folder, and you can't really use them. Why does this happen?
- Why can you not rename a shortcut? The option is greyed out.
- Once I create a shortcut, I can't find any information about what it points to in Azure Blob Storage. There is a "Properties" option for each table, but that information is not listed there.
So based on my testing:
- Lakehouse tables don't support hyphens, only underscores, so if your shortcut is named with a hyphen then it doesn't get registered as a table
- Great, here's hoping we get more comprehensive functionality
- I'm unsure of any metadata within the lakehouse itself, but when you create a shortcut to an external resource (ADLS, S3) it either uses or registers a new cloud connection. To view the connections:
- Click on Settings (gear icon top-right of fabric/power bi portal)
- Click Manage Connections and Gateways
- On the Connections tab are all the various connections including the connections made when registering shortcuts. ADLS will be of Connection Type Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
- It doesn't show what shortcuts are using what connections though, so may be of limited use
11 Replies
Hi, for your points:
- What are you creating a shortcut to, is it a Fabric item or an Azure Data Lake/AWS location and what file format?
- At the moment renaming is not supported, however there is a Shortcut API coming in the Fabric roadmap - hopefully support for managing shorcuts will be more comprehensive
- Are you looking for metadata to show you where the shortcut points to?
Hello, and thanks for the response/help!
- The shortcut is to a delta table stored in Azure Blob Storage ("Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2")
- Thanks for the information about the API. That is good to know.
- For example, imagine my shortcut is named "Orders", and points to a delta table with this path in Azure Blob Storage: /container-name/subdirectory-1-name/subdirectory-2-name/orders. I would like to be able to see that the "Orders" shortcut points at that path. Is this possible?
So based on my testing:
- Lakehouse tables don't support hyphens, only underscores, so if your shortcut is named with a hyphen then it doesn't get registered as a table
- Great, here's hoping we get more comprehensive functionality
- I'm unsure of any metadata within the lakehouse itself, but when you create a shortcut to an external resource (ADLS, S3) it either uses or registers a new cloud connection. To view the connections:
- Click on Settings (gear icon top-right of fabric/power bi portal)
- Click Manage Connections and Gateways
- On the Connections tab are all the various connections including the connections made when registering shortcuts. ADLS will be of Connection Type Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
- It doesn't show what shortcuts are using what connections though, so may be of limited use
Is it possible to create a shortcut from a Lakehouse to a Fabric SQL Database table?
I can shortcut from my Lakehouse to tables in my other Lakehouses. However, when I try to shortcut to my Fabric SQL Database via New Table Shortcut - Microsoft OneLake, I can see and pick the Fabric SQL Database but none of the tables under it appear?
Is this a permissions issue or is it just not possible?