The core principle governing this domain is data reference abstraction via "shortcuts," defined as logical pointers that maintain a single physical copy of datasets across distributed storage environments without replication. This mechanism operates within the Microsoft Fabric architecture to enable semantic access to external sources, such as Azure Data Lake Storage or Amazon S3 buckets, by resolving references at query execution time rather than ingestion time. Theoretically, this approach relies on the concept of virtualization in data lakes, where logical tables and file systems are constructed from pointers to disparate physical locations, thereby optimizing resource efficiency through a "one copy" storage policy while maintaining real-time accessibility for analytics workloads like Lakehouses and Warehouses.
The core principle governing this domain is data reference abstraction via "shortcuts," defined as logical pointers that maintain a single physical copy of datasets across distributed storage environ…