DP-700 Ingest and Transform Data Practice Question
You need to access data from an external Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 account in a Fabric Lakehouse without duplicating the physical data. Which feature should you use?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often choose 'Copy Activity' or 'Dataflow'. While these move data, they create duplicates. The question specifically asks to avoid physical data duplication, which mandates the use of Shortcuts.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Shortcut
Shortcuts provide a way to reference data stored in external locations without the need for data movement or replication. This approach reduces storage costs and ensures that the Fabric environment always sees the most current version of the source data. It is a fundamental concept in OneLake for maintaining a single source of truth across different cloud providers.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Dataflow Gen2
Why it's wrong here
Dataflows Gen2 are used for ingesting and transforming data through a Power Query interface. This process physically moves and transforms data from the source into a destination like a Lakehouse or Warehouse, resulting in data duplication and increased storage consumption within the Fabric workspace which violates the requirements.
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Copy Activity
Why it's wrong here
The Copy Activity in a Data Factory pipeline is designed to move data from a source to a sink. By definition, this creates a new copy of the data in the destination, which increases storage requirements and management overhead compared to using a virtualization method like OneLake Shortcuts.
- ✓
Shortcut
Why this is correct
Shortcuts allow OneLake to virtualize data from external sources such as ADLS Gen2, Amazon S3, or Google Cloud Storage. They eliminate the latency associated with traditional ETL processes by providing immediate access to the files as if they were natively stored within the Fabric Lakehouse file system.
- ✗
Mirroring
Why it's wrong here
Mirroring is a continuous data replication technology designed primarily for relational databases like Azure SQL or Snowflake. While it provides near real-time access to data, it involves creating a replica of the data in Fabric, which involves duplicating the physical data blocks rather than just referencing them.
About these practice questions
Courseiva writes every DP-700 question from scratch — 152 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Microsoft exam blueprint
This DP-700 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DP-700 exam.