Lakehouse - Shortcut questions

[Anonymous]

I have three questions about shortcuts in a lakehouse:

1. 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?
2. Why can you not rename a shortcut? The option is greyed out.
3. 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.

 

 

[AndyDDC]

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?

[Anonymous]

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?

[AndyDDC · Accepted solution]

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

[AndyDDC]

If you create a shortcut to a delta folder in ADLS and you give the shortcut a name with a hyphen in, then it can't register the shortcut table successfully.  If the shortcut name doesn't have a hyphen in, then the table shortcut can be registered successfully.

[Anonymous]

Thanks @AndyDDC  for explaining the issue!

@Anonymous - If hyphens are not supported, then I would expect to see a message that those are not allowed, like you would, for example, with spaces:

Also, I find it interesting that in the "Lakehouse" view (the toggle in the upper right corner), shortcuts with hyphens are put in the "Unidentified" folder:

But if I switch to "SQL endpoint" (the toggle in the upper right corner), then I am able to view the table:

[Anonymous]

Hi @Anonymous ,
Thanks for using Fabric Community.
1) The reason why some of the table shortcuts are marked as unidentified is because of the type of the table. If you create a shortcut for delta tables, they will be placed under the tables section. But if you create shortcuts for CSV or parquet tables, they will be moved to Unidentified folder.

You can only use shortcuts to access data in Delta Lake format. We strongly recommend that you use Delta Lake as your primary format for storing data. However, if you have data in other formats, such as Parquet, you need to convert them to Delta Lake to leverage Fabric warehouse and shortcuts.

2) Currently renaming a shortcut is not available in Fabric. Apologies for the inconvenience. 

3) At present, the underlying path for a shortcut is not exposed in Fabric. But we can certainly keep an eye for upvote.
Appreciate if you could share the feedback on our feedback link , which would be open for the user community to upvote & comment on. This allows our product teams to effectively prioritize your request against our existing feature backlog and gives insight into the potential impact of implementing the suggested feature.        
Feedback Link : Home (microsoft.com)

You can refer to this link for more information: Shortcuts
Hope this helps. Please let us know if you have any further queries.

[johnny_c]

Hi there, 

I have quite a similar problem - I'm creating a Shortcut in a Silver Layer Lakehouse (LH2), refering to another Bronze Lakehouse (LH1) in the same workspace. The shortcut points to the managed part/ table section of LH1 - where I have a delta table format, resulting from a copy activity via pipeline & a Notebook run: 

Until some months ago, I was able to create a shortcut via user interface, but now everything goes under 'Unidentified' Folder, with following error: shortcut unable to identify objects as tables. Any thoughts? Tried using only letters, but unsuccessfully.

Table in source LH1

Delta Format Table

Silver LH 2 shortcut

Error message:

Thanks

[AndyDDC]

I believe the OP stated that the remote folder was a delta folder.  In this instance, I believe it's not registering the table as the shortcut name has a hyphen in it, lakehouse tables cannot be named with a hyphen.

[AndyDDC]

Hi @Anonymous if this has been of help would you please mark this as the solution to close this off. Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hi @AndyDDC ,
Thanks for the information. Its true lakehouse tables only support underscores in their names.