How to Connect Microsoft OneLake with Snowflake

This creates a single, unified view of your data, enabling you to run Fabric workloads like Power BI reports or Spark jobs on data automatically synced from Snowflake.

Before you begin, ensure you have an active Microsoft Fabric workspace and the necessary connection details for your Snowflake account, including your account URL, warehouse, database, and role.

Understanding Snowflake Mirroring vs. Shortcuts

Microsoft Fabric offers two distinct ways to work with Snowflake data. Snowflake Mirroring automatically replicates Snowflake tables into OneLake, keeping them synchronized. Iceberg Shortcuts create zero-copy links to Iceberg-formatted data that Snowflake has written to external storage like Azure, S3, or GCS.

This tutorial covers Snowflake Mirroring, which is generally available as of January 2026 and provides the most direct integration for most use cases.

Step 1: Create a Mirrored Snowflake Database

From your Fabric workspace, click + New and select Mirrored Snowflake Database from the list of available items. This is a dedicated item type specifically for Snowflake replication, separate from regular Lakehouses or shortcuts.

Step 2: Configure Connection Settings

You will be prompted to provide connection details for your Snowflake instance. You can either create a new connection or select an existing one. For a new connection, you must fill in the following fields:

• Account URL: Your unique Snowflake account identifier URL
• Warehouse: The specific Snowflake warehouse to use for compute
• Database: The database containing the data you wish to replicate
• Schema: The schema within the specified database
• Role: The Snowflake role to use for access control

Step 3: Authenticate and Connect

Under Connection credentials, provide your authentication details. You can use your Snowflake Username and Password for basic authentication. Once entered, click Next to establish the connection.

Step 4: Select Tables to Mirror

After a successful connection, a browser will appear showing your Snowflake databases, schemas, and tables. Navigate to the tables you want to replicate into OneLake, check the boxes next to their names, and click Create. The mirroring process will begin automatically.

Step 5: Monitor Replication Status

Once created, the Mirrored Snowflake Database item will show replication status for each table. Initial replication can take time depending on table size. After the initial sync, Fabric continuously monitors Snowflake for changes and replicates them incrementally to keep OneLake data current.

How the Data Becomes Available

Mirrored tables are stored in OneLake in Delta Lake format. This means you can access them through any Fabric workload: Power BI reports, Spark notebooks, T-SQL queries, or Data Factory pipelines. The data appears as standard Delta tables within Fabric, indistinguishable from tables loaded through other methods.

Alternative: Using Iceberg Shortcuts

If your Snowflake tables are already in Iceberg format and written to external storage, you can create OneLake shortcuts directly to that storage instead of using mirroring. From a Lakehouse, select New shortcut, choose your cloud storage provider (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and point to the Iceberg table location. OneLake automatically converts Iceberg metadata to Delta Lake format.

This zero-copy approach works well if you manage Iceberg externally but doesn’t provide automatic replication from Snowflake’s native tables.

Why This Integration Matters

According to a recent announcement, Microsoft is working to bridge gaps with competitors by enabling these data connections. Instead of managing complex and costly ETL pipelines to move data from Snowflake to Fabric, teams can now rely on automated replication.

This approach reduces storage redundancy. Analysts using Power BI in Fabric can build reports on the same data that data scientists are using in Snowflake, ensuring everyone works from a synchronized source.

For organizations using both platforms, this connector simplifies data architecture and accelerates time-to-insight. It allows teams to leverage the best features of each ecosystem—Snowflake’s robust data warehousing and Fabric’s integrated analytics suite—without friction. You can find more detailed instructions in the official Microsoft Fabric documentation on OneLake shortcuts.