Comprehensive Detailed Explanation
Requirement
Tenant: Fabric tenant Tenant1
Data target: Lakehouse1
Data source: CSV file in an Azure Storage account (outside of Fabric)
Requirement: Minimize development effort
Step 1: Understand options
A). Dataflow Gen2
Used for ETL (transformations, cleansing, ingestion).
More effort because you need to build Power Query transformations.
Not minimal effort for simply exposing a file.
B). Shortcut
Fabric supports creating shortcuts to external data sources (OneLake, ADLS Gen2, Azure Blob, Dataverse, etc.).
Shortcut directly exposes external files/tables inside the lakehouse without copying or moving data.
This is the lowest-effort solution to access external CSV.
C). Copy job
Pipelines have a copy activity to physically copy data into Fabric.
Requires setup and execution. More development effort than a shortcut.
D). Pipeline
Used for orchestrating complex ETL workflows.
Overhead for this scenario.
Step 2: Correct Answer
Since the goal is simply to access a CSV in external storage with minimal development effort, the right solution is:
B). a shortcut
References
Shortcuts in Microsoft Fabric OneLake
Dataflow Gen2 overview