Vaccum and shortcuts

[PAC8309]

Hello! 

I have a simple questions about how vacuum will work with a shorcut table. A shortcut is a pointer to an external table. If I execute vaccum to the shortcut table in the lakehouse, will it erase parquet files only within the lakehouse or will it also affect the external table?

thank you!

[nilendraFabric · Accepted solution]

Hi @PAC8309 

The `VACUUM` command cleans up files in the managed Tables folder of the lakehouse where it’s executed. Since shortcuts don’t store actual data files in this managed area, there’s nothing for `VACUUM` to delete

Shortcut tables reference data in their original location (e.g., another lakehouse or storage) without duplicating files. The external data remains under the control of its source.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-engineering/lakehouse-table-maintenance

[v-prasare]

@PAC8309, As we haven’t heard back from you, we wanted to kindly follow up to check if the solution provided for your issue worked? or let us know if you need any further assistance here?

Thanks,

Prashanth Are

MS Fabric community support

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly and give Kudos if helped you resolve your query

[burakkaragoz · Accepted solution]

Hi @PAC8309 ,

Great question! When you run VACUUM on a shortcut table in a Fabric Lakehouse, it will not affect the external table that the shortcut points to.

Here’s how it works:

• Shortcut tables are just references—they don’t own or manage the underlying data.
• Running VACUUM on a shortcut will only apply to data physically stored in the Lakehouse, if any.
• Since the shortcut points to an external location (like ADLS Gen2 or S3), VACUUM has no authority to delete or modify files in that external source.

So you're safe—executing VACUUM on a shortcut won’t erase or impact the external Parquet files.

Let me know if you want to dive deeper into how shortcuts and metadata management work in Fabric!

[nilendraFabric · Accepted solution]

Hi @PAC8309 

The `VACUUM` command cleans up files in the managed Tables folder of the lakehouse where it’s executed. Since shortcuts don’t store actual data files in this managed area, there’s nothing for `VACUUM` to delete

Shortcut tables reference data in their original location (e.g., another lakehouse or storage) without duplicating files. The external data remains under the control of its source.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-engineering/lakehouse-table-maintenance

[DataGuru412]

As per the documenation VACCUME command will not make impact on Shortcut and external table. it will affect only files reside in lakehouse.

[PAC8309]

Thanks! Can I have a link to the documentation you are mentioning?