Hi, I’m looking for a feedback of architects/techies that implemented a user-friendly way for their non-IT business users to use their own data that is majoritarily in Excel files (or say CSVs).
The hypothesis here is that they don’t have access (or actually technical knowledge) to drop their files in any kind of datalake storage (AWS or ADLS or whatever)? Obviously, they can’t drop their files in Sharepoint (or Teams) folders and access them in Dremio since such datasource connectors don’t exist in Dremio.
Only option left I see is they can upload their data through the web UI in their personal space, and it becomes a PDS. Fine. The problem with that is : their Excel files must “live”: worksheets/data is often updated, but the web UI doesn’t allow for this: you have no way to ‘edit’ the Excel in Dremio, and if you were to update the Excel on your computer and would like to Upload the updated version of your Excel, then you’re in for some pain 
Dremio doesn’t allow you to upload another file with a filename similar to an existing PDS. You’d have to first rename your ‘updated’ Excel file, upload it, remove the existing PD, rename the ‘updated’ excel PD name to the previous one (this is because we need to keep any existing VDS that was referencing your PDS, so names must be kept…)
Anyone implemented something better in their org ? I can think of a possible solution using ADLS File Shares, network shares, and the NAS connector, but it is not trivial and will be a bit complex to implement. But I’m really interested to hear if anyone has implemented something more interesting… After all, Dremio advertises the product as Data-Mesh enabling, and in my definition datamesh is indeed a scenario where users can combine their own data with existing curated datasets, but if we don’t offer them a user-freindly way to do that, we won’t go very far…
Thanks for reading this far ^^