Skip to content
CSA Loom — the Microsoft Fabric experience for Azure tenants where Fabric isn't yet available: lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, semantic models, Activator rules, Data Agents, across Commercial, GCC, GCC-High, and DoD IL5

Lakehouse shortcuts

Reference data that lives in another store — ADLS Gen2, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Dataverse, or another Loom lakehouse — without copying a byte. A shortcut is a pointer that makes external data appear as a local folder under Files or a local table under Tables. Loom's lakehouse editor builds the OneLake-shortcut experience one-for-one, with the CSA Loom theme applied.

When to use it

Create a shortcut instead of an ingest pipeline when you want to:

  • Query data in another lakehouse, warehouse, or workspace without duplication (and without it going stale).
  • Read directly from external object storage (ADLS Gen2, S3, GCS) that your team already lands raw data into.
  • Combine several sources into one lakehouse view while leaving the bytes where they are — lower storage cost, single source of truth.

Copy the data instead (a Copy job or pipeline) when you need a transformed, governed, V-Order-optimized Delta copy in the Silver/Gold layers. Shortcuts are the Bronze-layer / landing-zone tool.

Where shortcuts live

The lakehouse editor opens at /items/lakehouse/<id> with a TabList: Files · Tables · Preview · SQL · Shortcuts. Shortcut behaviour differs by target tab, exactly as in Fabric:

Tab What a shortcut there does
Tables Must be at the top level (no subfolders). If the target holds Delta data, it is auto-registered as a queryable table — readable from both Spark and the SQL analytics endpoint.
Files Can sit at any folder depth, in any format. Not auto-registered as a table; Spark reads it directly.

Step-by-step: shortcut to ADLS Gen2

  1. Open the lakehouse item. Select the Files tab (or Tables if the target is Delta you want to query with SQL).
  2. On the toolbar, choose New shortcut. The source picker lists the supported sources Loom builds: Internal Loom lakehouse, ADLS Gen2 / Azure Blob, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Dataverse.
  3. Choose ADLS Gen2 / Azure Blob.
  4. Enter the URL — the DFS endpoint of the storage account: https://<account>.dfs.core.windows.net.
  5. Pick or create a connection. The auth kind must hold at least the Storage Blob Data Reader role on the account (Organizational account, Account key, SAS, Service principal, or the Console Workspace Identity).
  6. Browse to the target container/folder and select one or more locations.
  7. Review the names on the confirmation step (rename with the pencil, remove with the trash icon), then Create.

The shortcut appears in the Files tree with the shortcut glyph. Use Query this file to preview, or open the SQL tab to read a Delta shortcut through the SQL analytics endpoint.

Step-by-step: internal shortcut (another Loom item)

  1. New shortcut → Internal Loom lakehouse.
  2. Pick the target item (lakehouse, warehouse, KQL database, mirrored database, or SQL database) — even across workspaces. The item types do not need to match; a lakehouse can shortcut to a warehouse folder.
  3. Select the Tables/... or Files/... path and Create.

Internal shortcuts authorize with the calling user's identity — the user must have read permission on the target. External shortcuts use the stored connection credential.

Honest infra gate

If the storage account is behind a firewall, the editor surfaces a Fluent MessageBar (intent="warning") naming the trusted-workspace-access configuration required. The full shortcut UI still renders — Loom never fakes a shortcut listing.

Tip

Put structured data you'll query with SQL in Tables (use New table shortcut for a single Delta table, New schema shortcut for a folder of Delta tables). Put raw / semi-structured data you'll process with Spark in Files.

Learn more