sql and more for finding what is hidden in CiviCRM!
Don't trust Civi, because it relies on cron jobs to set membership status. This happens late, and race conditions are certain to happen.
Use the view membership_logs.daily_membership_type_total_aggregate. You must run CALL populate_daily_membership_totals('2016-01-01'); to regen the cache before runnung this view if you want current data.
civicrm_membership_log is treated as the gound truth. civicrm_membership is only used to map the relations between membership, contact, and membership_log.
civicrm_activity is used to produce mapping of so called "merged and deleted" contacts
the membership_logs database is fully ephimeral. It can be recreated from scratch by running each create table and create view command in this repo.
- Put this in a pretty graph