Shortcuts-only bronze: stop copying what OneLake already holds
· 6 min read
Medallion diagrams still tempt teams to land a physical bronze copy of everything upstream. When the upstream domain already publishes curated Delta in OneLake, that copy is not prudence. It is a second warehouse with a friendlier name.
Bronze can be a contract of shortcuts and thin clean views. Ownership stays with the publisher. Freshness follows the source. Your CI/CD list becomes the shortcut set, not a shadow catalog of cloned tables.
Figure 1. Bronze can be a pointer surface. Prefer OneLake shortcuts over copying bytes the platform already holds. Source: Microsoft Learn: OneLake shortcuts.