Microsoft OneLake adds shortcut support to Power Platform and Dynamics 365
Microsoft OneLake is the OneDrive for data providing a single, unified data lake as a service for your entire organization. While OneLake provides a location to store data, shortcuts can virtualize data that you have stored elsewhere into OneLake even if that data resides in another cloud. With shortcuts, data will appear in OneLake as if it were physically there without any data movement or duplication.
We are excited to announce you can now create shortcuts directly to your Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data in Dataverse and analyze it with Microsoft Fabric alongside the rest of your OneLake data. There is no need to export data, build ETL pipelines or use third-party integration tools. Simply click Link to Microsoft Fabric and you can start working with your data immediately.
Link to Microsoft Fabric
To get started, open the Power Apps maker portal at https://make.preview.powerapps.com where you see all your Dataverse tables. Right-click on a table and select Link to Microsoft Fabric.
A Fabric lakehouse is created for you with a OneLake shortcut. The shortcut makes your table data appear as though it has been copied into the lakehouse; however, it is a reference to the Dataverse location where the entity is stored. Each time you select a new table and click Link to Microsoft Fabric, a new shortcut is created in the lakehouse.
The table data in the Dataverse is now formatted using the Delta\Parquet standard. All workloads within Fabric natively support this format. You can analyze your data with Spark, SQL, and Power BI reports without any data transformation.
Synapse Link
If you are already using Synapse Link for Dataverse, your transition to Fabric just got easier. Open the Power Apps maker portal and choose Synapse Link. Right-click on your link profile and select Link to Microsoft Fabric. A new lakehouse is created for your link profile and a new shortcut is created for every table in that link profile. The shortcut points to the ADLS storage account configured for the synapse link rather than the Dataverse location. You can immediately start using Fabric without interrupting any of your existing processes for extracting and analyzing data.
For a detailed guide on setting up Dataverse integration with Fabric see the document here.
Watch the video below to see it in action.
