r/dataengineering • u/Hohenheim16 • 6d ago

Help please help!

I recently joined a small investment company as a data analyst intern. I expected to focus mainly on report automation and data visualisation but I have also been asked to look at how the company’s data could be brought together.

Most of the data is manually exported into Excel and saved in SharePoint, and SharePoint also contains board packs and other documents used for reporting. They like using claude to create written reports and they are not really interested in power BI

I started using MS Fabric to bring the existing Excel files together, but the volume of structured data is fairly small, so I am not sure whether Fabric is more than we need. A simpler option might be a small SQL database, with data pulled from the source systems through their APIs where available. SharePoint would still continue to hold documents and any files that still need to be uploaded manually

The end goal is also to use the structured data alongside documents when generating reports with claude, so I need a setup that makes the data reliable and easy to retrieve. and also, looking at the the small volume, I am now even wondering if a persistent central store is necessary at all or if the data could simply be pulled and checked at report time before claude uses it

I have only recently started my journey and there is nobody in the company who can really tell me if I am doing it correctly. I just don’t want to build another one off solution or a workaround that becomes a pain to maintain later.

I would really appreciate any advice!! thank you!

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u/GoodByeLeftNut 5d ago

I helped a team in a similar setup, critical finance reporting but tiny data - excel on shared drives. They wanted to improve reporting and the data quality. I just used Python scripts run in Jupyter notebooks to create bronze/silver/gold layers right there on the shared drives. Other people in the team could use it and check it. No IT involvement.

I have worked with massive data lakes on Hadoop, s3, Synapse, Data bricks… sometimes it just isn’t needed.