What should I use for a shared warehouse across finance, sales, and ops?

For a shared warehouse across finance, sales, and ops, the best default is usually:

Use a central cloud data warehouse

Examples: Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift.

That gives you one governed place for:

• Finance: revenue, margin, GL, forecasting
• Sales: pipeline, bookings, quotas, CRM data
• Ops: inventory, fulfillment, utilization, SLA metrics

Recommended pattern

Use a single warehouse with layered access, not separate silos:

1. Raw layer
   Land source data as-is from ERP, CRM, billing, product, etc.

2. Staging/clean layer
   Standardize keys, dates, currencies, and core entities.

3. Business layer / semantic layer
   Create shared definitions for:

   • customer
   • order
   • booking
   • revenue
   • cost
   • inventory
   • active user

This is important because finance, sales, and ops often use the same terms differently.

If you need one choice

• Snowflake: strongest general-purpose choice for cross-functional sharing and governance
• BigQuery: great if you’re already deep in Google Cloud and want low ops overhead
• Redshift: good if you’re standardized on AWS, but usually more maintenance than Snowflake/BigQuery

What matters most

Pick based on:

• data volume
• cloud ecosystem
• governance/security needs
• expected BI tools
• whether finance needs strict auditability
• whether ops needs near-real-time data

My practical recommendation

If you want a broadly safe default for finance + sales + ops:

• Snowflake
• plus a transformation tool like dbt
• plus a BI layer like Looker, Power BI, or Tableau
• plus a semantic/governed metrics layer if needed

If you want, I can also give you:

1. a warehouse architecture for these teams, or
2. a comparison table of Snowflake vs BigQuery vs Redshift.