Most product teams have the opposite of an analytics problem. They have too many metrics. Page views, session counts, click-through rates, bounce rates — dashboards full of numbers that don't clearly connect to whether the product is actually working.
SQL changes this. When you query your own event data directly, you stop asking "what does the tool show me?" and start asking "what do I actually need to know?" Tools like Draxlr let you run these queries as live dashboards your team can revisit without re-running anything manually. That shift in framing is worth more than any analytics SaaS subscription.
This article covers the SQL queries that genuinely move the needle: active users, conversion funnels, cohort retention, and feature adoption. All with realistic table structures you can adapt to your own schema.
Your Starting Schema
Most product databases have some version of these three tables. The queries below assume this structure:
