Is it possible to create a shortcut on a specific partition value?

[amaaiia]

Hi.

I have 2 lakehouses: LH1 and LH2. LH1 has a SALES table partitioned by YEAR.

I've been asked to create a shortcut in LH2 of YEAR=2025 data of SALES table in LH1.

I've tried to create a shortcut selecting YEAR=2025 folder in Tables folder of LH2. However, is says Undefined in LH2, I guess because it's not a shortcut to a delta table, but to a list of parquet files.

Is it possible to create a shortcut to a specific partition of a delta table?

[nilendraFabric · Accepted solution]

@amaaiia Creating a shortcut for a specific partition of a Delta table, such as Year=2025, in Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse is not directly supported because Shortcuts can only reference entire Delta tables, not specific partitions within those tables. This is because shortcuts rely on the Delta format's metadata for table discovery and query execution, which operates at the table level rather than at the partition level.

 For the shortcut to work, the target folder must include Delta table metadata (e.g.,_delta_log) that allows Fabric to recognize it as a Delta table. A folder containing only Parquet files for a specific partition (e.g., YEAR=2025) lacks this metadata, causing the shortcut to be undefined in the Lakehouse.

Instead of creating a shortcut, you can create a new Delta table in LH2 that contains only the YEAR=2025 data.

If you want to create a shortcut for just the partition folder (e.g.,YEAR=2025 ), you can do so in the Files section of LH2. However, this will not be recognized as a Delta table and cannot be queried using SQL directly

. You would need to load it into Spark as raw Parquet files later.

[govindarajan_d]

Hi @amaaiia,

Any delta lake table you see in LH, if you see the underlying files, you would find - _delta_log folder. This represents that it is a delta lake table and contains many json files that make up the delta log. Without this folder and its files, Fabric would not recognize a particular folder as a delta lake table. 

So, a shortcut on a partition folder of Delta lake table would not work, unless it contains the delta log. But you can process those files as a bunch of parquet files in Spark/Pipeline/DF g2. 

If you are looking to shortcut into a different workspace, you can shortcut the entire table, create a SQL view on top of it with a filter YEAR = 2025. The performance would be equal to having a separate table containing 2025 data alone. The partition information is used to skip the folders and files that do not match the filter condition.