External Tables in Fabric

[mpolonskiy5637]

Hello,

reading and understanding more about shortcuts in Fabric it seems like Unmanaged / External Tables are useless.

The main point of an external Table in Spark is to leave data where it is and have a table which references this data. Thus only metadata is managed by spark and deleting this table does not effect the original data. Is this not exactly what a shortcut in fabric is? Why would I even create an External Table in Fabric and what is the point of a shortcut external table, which is technically possible but does not seem to make much sense.

[jovanpop-msft]

@mpolonskiy5637 external tables do not exist in Fabric. If you need them you can vote for this idea: https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Fabric-Ideas/Support-external-tables-for-parquet-csv-in-Fa...

As @AndyDDC mentiond shortcut are just references to delta data sets where sql endpoint will automatically discover and create table for you, and the table will reference external data. 
If you need to create your own external table that is referencing parquet or csv instead of delta, you would need the OPENROWSET function or a custom external table that is described here: https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Fabric-Ideas/Support-external-tables-for-parquet-csv-in-Fa...

[AndyDDC · Accepted solution]

IMHO it's about choice. Leave the data where it is in the external storage and simply create a shortcut to it, no need to create an external table over that data. With External Tables you could choose to create them over file data in the Files area of the Lakehouse (for example). Shortcuts just bypass the step of you having to define the external table definition