Direct Lake Demands: Why OneLake Shortcuts Win in Fabric Production

While Microsoft Fabric's documentation suggests OneLake shortcuts and ADLS Gen2 mounts are interchangeable, production experience reveals they have fundamentally different security postures and performance characteristics. Shortcuts enable Direct Lake—the zero-latency BI mode that's become essential for modern analytics—while mounts cannot. Shortcuts also honor storage ACLs for proper access isolation, whereas mounts run under a single service principal, creating a unified blast radius across all notebooks.