We’re excited to introduce a highly-requested feature that enhances your experience with OneLake: the ability to define security settings on folders within a shortcut! When a shortcut is created in OneLake it references a data lake path. This can be thought of as the root of the shortcut. There can be one or more additional folder paths within that shortcut, which are the sub-folders. When OneLake data access roles was released, security could only be defined on the shortcut root itself. However, with this new release you can define security on any sub-folder within the shortcut root. Let’s look at an example of how this simplifies security management.
Security on folders in action
I have an AWS S3 bucket called s3://contoso-outdoors that I created a shortcut to. Within this bucket are additional folders each containing a table. The shortcut on OneLake now refers to this location as Files/S3Data. Each of the tables within Files/S3Data is a sub-folder. Some of the sub-folders I have are S3Data/employee_test or S3Data/Tables.
I might want to define access to this shortcut data such that one group of users can see the employee_test sub-folder, and another can only see the Tables sub-folder. With the latest addition to OneLake data access roles, I can easily do this.
I open the 'Manage OneLake data access' pane and select my role SubFolderTest.
Under the 'Selected folders' option, I can then browse S3Data and choose the employee_test sub-folder to grant access to as part of this role. Any of the sub-folders can be selected, and I can further expand the folders to grant access to additional items. Once I make my selections I can save the role.
By combining this feature with lakehouse schemas, you can now create a single shortcut to data and manage security for hundreds or thousands of different users with ease.
Securing shortcut sub-folders with OneLake data access roles is available now in public preview. Try it out and leave a comment below with any questions or feedback.
Next steps
Get started with OneLake data access roles.
Learn more about security in OneLake.