Introducing external data sharing: a new way to collaborate across Fabric tenants
These days every company is a data company. More specifically, every company has data that can provide added value to someone else. And even more to the point, data sharing has become a common and essential practice for many organizations. Whether it is sharing data with suppliers, customers, partners, or consultants, data sharing enables better business outcomes and insights.
Today, we’re excited to announce the public preview of External Data Sharing, a new feature that makes it possible for Fabric users to share data from within their Fabric tenant with users in another Fabric tenant.
With external data sharing, you can share data “in-place” from OneLake storage locations, without copying any data. The data that is shared across tenant boundaries is exposed to consumers as read-only, and can be consumed by any Fabric computation engine, including SQL, Spark, KQL, and semantic models. Fabric promotes the concept of maintaining a single logical copy of your data. External data sharing extends this capability across tenant boundaries.
Get started with external data sharing
Before you can start sharing or accepting data from other Fabric users, external data sharing needs to be turned on, both in the tenant the data is being shared from and in tenant the data is being shared to. In the sharing tenant, navigate to the Fabric admin portal and turn on the tenant setting External data sharing (preview). In the tenant that’s receiving the share, navigate to the admin portal and turn on the tenant setting Allow users to accept external data shares (preview).
We often call OneLake the OneDrive for all your data. Sharing data in Fabric is now as easy as sharing data in OneDrive. To share data, go to a workspace or the OneLake data hub and select the item that contains data you want to share. Supported item types include Lakehouse, Warehouse, KQL Database, and any of the mirrored database types. Open the context menu of the selected item and select External data share (preview). Select the folder or table to be shared and click Save and continue. Enter the email address of the user you want to invite, add an optional message and select Send.
To accept a share, find the invitation email in your inbox and select the Get started button. You’ll be taken to the Fabric portal and shown a dialog with the share details. Select Accept and select a location.
Choose a lakehouse and select Next. Choose the table or folder location in which to create the incoming share shortcut, and then select Apply. The share has now been created in your OneLake location. You can now consume data coming from another tenant in your notebooks, pipelines, Power BI reports, or any other Fabric workload.
Finally, existing shares can be viewed and managed on the External data shares tab of the shared item’s manage permissions page in the sharing tenant.
Learn more about our public preview here!
We have many exciting improvements planned, including public APIs for better development support, the ability to share more than one folder or table at a time, and additional governance and monitoring capabilities.
