Ad-Hoc PostgreSQL Analysis Without Friction

Dashboards are great for known questions. But your job is answering unknown questions—the ones that come up in meetings, the investigations triggered by anomalies, the "can you quickly check..." requests that turn into hour-long rabbit holes. SaturnSQL gives you a fast, clean PostgreSQL workspace for exactly this kind of work.

The typical ad-hoc analysis workflow involves a lot of context-switching. You might start in a local SQL client, copy results to a spreadsheet to share with someone, paste the query into Slack when they ask how you got those numbers, and then lose track of the whole thing a week later when a follow-up question comes in. SaturnSQL keeps everything in one place—the query, the results, and the ability to share both with a link.

The editor is optimized for exploration. Multiple tabs let you pursue parallel lines of investigation without losing your place—you might have one tab checking overall conversion rates while another digs into a specific user cohort. Schema search helps you find the right table or column quickly, and sample data previews let you validate your understanding of the data before writing complex joins. When you get an answer, you can export to CSV and move on, or save the query so it's there next time someone asks the same question.

The kinds of questions this is good for

Product behavior deep dives are a natural fit. Someone notices that engagement dropped last week and wants to understand why—you can quickly segment by user type, look at feature usage patterns, compare cohorts, and iterate until you find something interesting. The investigation might take 20 queries before you get to an answer, and having them all in tabs means you can backtrack if a promising lead doesn't pan out.

Growth and funnel analysis works well too. Conversion rates, drop-off points, the impact of experiments—these are questions that come up constantly and rarely fit neatly into existing dashboards. You need to slice the data differently each time, and you need answers quickly enough that the meeting doesn't move on without you. Being able to write SQL directly, with good autocomplete and instant results, gets you there faster than clicking through a dashboard builder.

One-off stakeholder questions are maybe the most common use case. The CEO wants to know how many enterprise customers signed up last quarter. Marketing needs a list of users who match certain criteria for a campaign. Finance is reconciling numbers and needs the raw data behind a metric. These requests don't justify building a dashboard, but they do need accurate answers fast. SaturnSQL lets you get the answer, share it, and get back to your real work.

Common questions

Do I need a specific schema or modeling layer? No. SaturnSQL works directly on your Postgres database, whatever shape it's in. Query your raw tables, your dbt models, your application schema—whatever you have access to.

Can I share results with non-SQL people? Yes. You can share a link to the query and its results, or export to CSV. Viewers don't need to write SQL themselves—they just see the output with the context of how it was generated.