Why does SQL feel like control?
SQL gives you a comforting illusion: if I can query it, I own it. I’ve seen teams ship “single source of truth” dashboards that were basically single source of confusion.
What actually steals control?
Not the code. The assumptions around it.
• Wrong unit of analysis (user vs session vs order)
• Filters added “temporarily” and never removed
• Definitions that live in someone’s head
Same SQL skills. Different outcomes.
What GA4 data does to your brain
GA4 export is raw and flexible, which is great… until flexibility becomes ambiguity. SQL won’t stop you from building a metric that answers a different question than the business asked.
How I keep metrics sane
I describe every metric in one sentence before writing SQL.
• What I’m counting
• At what level
• For what decision
If I can’t explain it, I don’t compute it.
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