With Fabric, as a data provider, you can centralize all your data and grant users access only to the information they need, instead of providing open access to each department. In the traditional data warehouse model, you might create a single dataset for the entire company. When the sales team needs something different, you make adjustments and generate a new dataset. Marketing may require additional modifications, leading to yet another dataset. Over time, the sole source of truth becomes a matter of conflicting interpretations.

In OneLake, you can store data in lakehouses and create tailored views in different workspaces to suit each business user’s needs without duplicating data. That’s pretty neat, right? You can achieve this with the help of shortcuts! Here’s how.

Use the following steps to enable cross-workspace data analytics(To query data from Warehouse A residing in another workspace than your Warehouse B）:

1. Create a lakehouse in the same workspace as your Warehouse B.

2. In that lakehouse, create a shortcut pointing to the required databases or tables from Warehouse A (How to create shortcut https://dailybitalks.com/2024/05/fabric-tips-how-to-create-shortcut-in-onelake/)

3. Open Warehouse B and in the Explorer, select the + Warehouses button to add the newly created Lakehouse.

4. Select the SQL analytics endpoint of the lakehouse you created using shortcuts previously, named ShortcutExercise. Both items are added to the query.

5. Your selected warehouses now show the same Explorer pane.

6. You can now drag&drop or using custom query to query the Warehouse A table

SELECT * FROM [lakehouse].[dbo].[table_shortcuted_from_warehouse_A]

Using shortcuts in lakehouses is a helpful workaround, but it would be even better if we could remove this intermediate step, allowing administrators to review and query data across warehouses directly. Otherwise, it may confuse business users when workspaces are revealed, and they discover two similar but distinct warehouses/lakehouses that can’t be explicitly hidden. Ideally, Microsoft would lift this restriction and permit direct querying of warehouses across different workspaces.