Table of Content

1. Introduction: Overview of Shortcuts and Mirroring

2. Understanding Microsoft Fabric Shortcuts

• • Key Benefits
  • Creating Shortcuts In Microsoft Fabric (OneLake)
  • Creating Shortcuts In Microsoft Fabric (AWS S3 Bucket)

3. Understanding Microsoft Fabric Mirroring

• • Key Benefits
  • Setting up Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric

4. Key Points

5. Conclusion

Introduction:

Overview of Shortcut and Mirroring

Shortcuts:
Shortcuts in Microsoft OneLake allow you to unify your data across domains, clouds, and accounts by creating a single virtual data lake for your entire enterprise. All Fabric experiences and analytical engines can directly connect to your existing data sources such as Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and OneLake through a unified namespace.

Mirroring:

Traditional As a data replication solution, Mirroring in Fabric is a low-cost and low-latency solution to bring data from various systems together into a single analytics platform. You can continuously replicate your existing data estate directly into Fabric’s OneLake, including data from Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB, and Snowflake.

Understanding Microsoft Fabric Shortcuts

Definition and Purpose

Shortcuts are objects in OneLake that point to other storage locations. The location can be internal or external to OneLake. The location that a shortcut points to is known as the target path of the shortcut. The location where the shortcut appears is known as the shortcut path. Shortcuts appear as folders in OneLake and any workload or service that has access to OneLake can use them. Shortcuts behave like symbolic links. They’re an independent object from the target. If you delete a shortcut, the target remains unaffected. If you move, rename, or delete a target path, the shortcut can break.

Diagram showing how a shortcut connects files and folders stored in other locations.

Key Benefits

OneLake’s Shortcuts enables us to create live connections between OneLake and existing    target data sources, whether internal or external to Azure. This allows us to retrieve data from these locations as if they were seamlessly integrated into Microsoft Fabric.

Onelake’s Shortcut functions as a hyperlink to an alternate storage location, utilizing data connectors to retrieve requested data from the sources. The key distinction lies in users not having to be familiar with the data schema or the language required for data retrieval at the source.

Onelake’s Shortcuts establish an abstract layer, generating a unified view of the data managed by Microsoft Fabric. Consequently, end users simply need to determine the relevant information from the data catalog for their business needs, and Fabric will seamlessly handle the rest.
By enabling us to reference different storage locations, OneLake’s Shortcuts provides a unified source of truth for all our data within the Microsoft Fabric environment and ensures clarity regarding the origin of our data.

Creating Shortcuts in Microsoft Fabric (OneLake) 

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Open a Lakehouse.

2. Right-click on a directory within the Explorer pane of the Lakehouse

3. Select New Shortcut

4. Select Source (OneLake)

5. Select the data source you want to connect to, and then select Next.

6. Expand Files or Tables, and select one or more subfolders to connect to, then select Next.

7. Review your selected shortcut locations. Use the edit action to change the default shortcut name. Use the delete action to remove any undesired selections. Select Create to generate shortcuts.

Creating Shortcuts in Microsoft Fabric (AWS S3 Bucket) 

Step-by-Step Guide

1. Under External sources, select Amazon S3

2. Enter the connection settings according to the following table.

3. Browse to the target location for the shortcut.

4. Select next

5. Select Create

Understanding Microsoft Fabric Mirroring

Definition and Purpose

In today’s business environment, many organizations managing their relational data commonly adopt diverse solutions like Azure Synapse, Teradata, MongoDB, SQL Server, Azure Databricks, Snowflake, etc. This is primarily due to the difficulties they encounter in dedicating the required time, budget, and resources for migrations, impeding the establishment of a unified data Lakehouse that functions as a single source of truth.
Similarity, accessing and managing this data involves navigating complex ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) pipelines, business processes, and decision silos, resulting in additional disadvantages. These include mission-critical data stored in silos, resulting in restricted access, prolonged wait times for data processes, constrained tool flexibility for analysis, an absence of collaboration foundation, and the lack of common, open data formats for diverse analytical scenarios.

Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric addresses these disadvantages by offering two key experiences to expedite the realization of insights and decisions:

• Near real-time replication of data into a SaaS data lake, featuring integrated analytics experiences for both BI and AI.
• Depending to the data source, the capability to edit and work with preferred data sources within Fabric, enhancing productivity for both no-code and pro-code developers.

Key Benefits

Mirroring provides a modern way of accessing and ingesting data continuously and seamlessly from any database or data warehouse into the Data Warehousing experience in Microsoft Fabric. This is all in near real-time thus giving users immediate access to changes in the source.
No complex ETL processes required for data replication.
Mirroring facilitates seamless integration with other analytical engines and tools.

Setting up Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric 

Step-by-Step Guide

Enable Mirroring for your tenant:

In your tenant, you can enable Mirroring for:

The entire organization – In most cases your organization has one tenant, so selecting this option enables Mirroring for the entire organization. In organizations that have several tenants, if you want to enable Mirroring for the entire organization, you need to enable it in each tenant.
Specific security groups – Use this option to enable Mirroring for specific users. You can either specify the security groups that Mirroring will be enabled for, or the security groups that Mirroring won’t be available for.

Follow these steps to enable Mirroring for your tenant.

1. Navigate to the tenant settings in the admin portal and in Microsoft Fabric, expand Mirroring (preview).
2. Enable the Mirroring (preview) switch.
3. (Optional) Use the Specific security groups option to enable Mirroring for specific users. You can also use the Except specific security groups option, to enable Mirroring for the tenant, and exclude specific users.
4. Select Apply.

Capacity admins can override this setting, depending on their needs. For example, because Mirroring is in preview, your organization decided not to enable it. However, your organization also has a group of developers who want to experiment with mirrored databases. In such cases, Mirroring can be enabled at the capacity level.

Enable Mirroring for a capacity –

Follow these steps to enable Database Mirroring for a specific capacity.

1. Navigate to the capacity settings in the admin portal.
2. Select the capacity where you want to enable Mirroring.
3. Select the Delegate tenant settings tab.
4. Expand the Mirroring (Preview) setting.
5. Check the Override tenant admin selection checkbox and verify that the Mirroring (preview) setting is enabled.
6. (Optional) Use the Specific security groups option to enable Mirroring for specific users. You can also use the Except specific security groups option, to enable Mirroring for the capacity, and exclude specific users.

Select Apply.

Note – You’ll need to create a Shareable Cloud Connection (SCC) for this Semantic Model, by default its set to Single Sign-On (Entra ID).

Key Points:

Conclusion:

With OneLake at its core, Microsoft Fabric provides a unified SaaS data lake, supporting data virtualization through innovative features like Shortcuts and Mirroring. Shortcuts enhance accessibility and reduce data duplication, while Mirroring facilitates real-time replication and centralized data management. The platform’s compatibility with Azure Databricks further enhances its versatility, making Microsoft Fabric a comprehensive solution for modern analytics needs.

Whenever the actual data on real time basis and need centralized management over data you can chose Mirroring.
A key difference between Shortcut and Mirroring will be performance – depending on the location of the data it may have some network lag to accommodate.

Blog Author