Forum Discussion
Shortcut table not showing in SQL Endpoint nor Dataset
Thanks for the additional info!
The limitation you highlighted makes no sense to me, that article talks in detail on how ADLS shortcuts work, so how can they be not supported?? Looks more like a documentation not up to date from Microsoft.
Yeah some of the Fabric stuff is still in the early stage, even though it's GA. I'm sure they'll improve it over time, we need to be patient.
I just got verified from MS support who checked with the responsible persons in the product team (regarding the limitation of having to share the cloud connection); this is apparently intended behaviour - and wont be fixed.
I'm very dissapointed by this answer, as it shows that no real thought has been spent on the practical usage of external shortcuts.
As mentioned above, we now find ourselves in a situation where we either have to create one cloud conneciton per external delta lake table, and manage sharing of these connections (thousands of connections) manually to allow users to create shortcuts to the data..
..or we use one top level cloud connection (as we do now), and share this with the entire organization, and live with the fact that all users in fabric can bypass any and all table security (object level and RLS) by simply mapping their own external shortcuts pointing directly to the ADLS Gen 2 delta lake tables.
We faced similar security issues in Synapse serverless, where all users who had the Synapse workspace managed identity credential shared with them could actually bypass all table security if they knew the storage layer and wrote their own OPENROWSET queries. The response from MS 6 months back when pointing this out was that it wouldnt be fixed. When Fabric got released I was hopeful that the external shortcut support in Lakehouses would fix this issue - but the very same security and usability issues just seem to have been carried over 😞