Creating Shortcut To KQL Table In Fabric Lakehouse
Trick to create a shortcut to new KQL tables in the lakehouse
Shortcuts in Microsoft Fabric are one of the best features that allow you to point to any location on OneLake from any engine without moving the original data. It just magically makes it appear virtually via embedded references within OneLake. The official Microsoft documentation walks you through how to create shortcuts in the lakehouse, and KQL database and can be accessed using any Fabric engine. You can create shortcuts for tables as well as structured/unstructured data in the Files section.
Similar to the lakehouse, you can add a table or the files as a shortcut in the KQL database. In fact, in my last blog I showed a use case for doing that. However, what I have not seen in the official documentation yet is how to add a Kusto table as a shortcut in the lakehouse. If you pick KQL database as the source of the shortcut, you will see the table list is empty.
The Solution
The solution is rather easy.
By default, when you create a KQL database, its OneLake folder path is inactive. If you activate the folder path, any new tables that are added to the KQL tables can be added as a shortcut in the lakehouse.
Activate folder:
Now if you browse to the KQL database in the Lakehouse shortcut option, you will be able to pick the table and add it as a shortcut in the Files section.
After adding to the Lakehouse as a shortcut, you can use it as any other data in the notebooks ! Query it using any language of your choice - KQL, Python, R, Scala. You should also be able to access this data using the OneLake API.
You can check out my KQL related blogs here.
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About the author
Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Fabric CAT helping users and organizations build scalable, insightful, secure solutions. Blogs, opinions are my own and do not represent my employer.
Comments
Join the discussionQ: Can we create shortcuts in a Lakehouse that point to tables in a Warehouse? I mean, how do we get data from a WH to an LH? I'd appreciate any documentation link. Thanks.
Hi. Interesting article. Did you also try to create a shortcut to a Kusto DB that is already a shortcut from an ADX shortcut? In a lakehouse I'm trying to shortcut a Kusto Database. That Kusto database is a shortcut to a Azure ADX Kusto database. Even if I activate onelake paths, add the shortcut half an hour later, the table list is empty.
Hi Anand, you can't create shortcuts in a WH. You can add Dims from different WH/LH to a LH and then create a DL model on top of that.
Hi Sandeep, It is a good article on Shortcuts in KQL.
But do you have ideas why there is no Shortcut functionality available in Warehouse? It was avaiable in Nov 2023 time period but disappreared during GA. Now the documentation says it is only supported in Lakehouse.
When we have to load shared DIMs across different Warehouses, I have to load sepearte copies - breaking the whole One Copy of Data Fabric marketing point! Options: Create Views: Direct Lake connections falls back to Direct Query when using Views Clone tables: Need to create everyday thus will break Semantic layer relationships.
What do you suggest follow to load shared DIMs across different Warehouses?