topic Re: Renaming of shortcuts for "managed tables" in Lakehouse in Data Engineering

Renaming of shortcuts for "managed tables" in Lakehouse

FelixL — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 10:21:23 GMT

When creating external shortcuts (to ADLS Gen 2 DeltaLake tables) I am able to freely name my shortcuts whatever I want in the Fabric Lakehouse. This is a great functionality, and is how I expect shortcuts to behave. My underlying DeltaLake table might be named something technical to match my architecture/standards, but when making it available to end users via a Fabric Lakehouse I might want to clean up the name and present it as something more readable.

However, when creating OneLake shourtcuts between one Lakehouse to another Lakehouse i dont seem to get the same option. In this case the table in the target Lakehouse (where shortcut is created) seem to be forcibly locked to the table name in the source Lakehouse (where the managed DeltaLake table lives). This poses limitations on how you configure your solution, since you then need to name your managed DeltaLake tables to friendly names right away, or will have to present them to end users using naming standards that might not be optimal for consumption.

Imagine a case (my case) where I have a master Lakehouse containing all my orginizational marts in DeltaLake format. I have named all my tables using a naming schema that works great for that specific Lakehouse; "gold_[mart]_[fact/dim]_[tablename]". This makes sense for the purpose of this Lakehouse. However when I present this to the business users I want to do so via multiple different "mart specific" Lakehouses. In those Lakehouses I want to be able to drop the "gold_[mart]_" part of the table name, since it makes no sense in this context.

Today my master lakehouse lives in Synapse Analytics, and all my DeltaLake tables are as such mapped as external to their target Lakehouses in Fabric, meaning I can rename the shortcuts at creation and it all looks great for the end users. But were I to move in to Fabric fully, I would face the issue of not being able to rename my shortcuts any longer.

Will this functionality be available down the road? Or do I need to work around it by re-designing my architecture/standard to cope with the limitations in Fabric?

Thanks!

Re: Renaming of shortcuts for "managed tables" in Lakehouse

v-cboorla-msft — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 09:36:08 GMT

Hi @FelixL

Thanks for using Microsoft Fabric Community and reporting this.
I have reached the internal team for help regarding this. I will update once I hear back from them.
Appreciate your patience.

Re: Renaming of shortcuts for "managed tables" in Lakehouse

AndyDDC — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 18:36:53 GMT

There's an API coming for Shortcuts. I wonder if this functionality will be added. Might be worth creating a feedback Item

What's new and planned for OneLake in Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Re: Renaming of shortcuts for "managed tables" in Lakehouse

FelixL — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 19:45:23 GMT

Yeah, lets hope! I also added this as an Idea in the "Fabric Ideas" community. Please upvote there if you also see the value of this!

Re: Renaming of shortcuts for "managed tables" in Lakehouse

v-cboorla-msft — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 13:05:59 GMT

Hi @FelixL

Currently there is no possibility to change the name of shortcut created tables, but our engineers are working on updates that will enable these features. Glad to know that you got some insights from the link provided by @AndyDDC. Please continue using Fabric Community for help regarding your issues.

Re: Renaming of shortcuts for "managed tables" in Lakehouse

TimKnight — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 01:27:21 GMT

It looks like this feature has been added.

I have a "base" set of dimension tables that users can create shortcuts to use in their Lakehouse.

When creating the shortcut, click on the pencil, rename the table, and save with the checkmark.

Now there are two date dimension tables, but only one copy of the actual data via shortcut.