diff --git a/cmd/statreceiver/README.md b/cmd/statreceiver/README.md
index b9157b8b1..e29a25991 100644
--- a/cmd/statreceiver/README.md
+++ b/cmd/statreceiver/README.md
@@ -23,3 +23,8 @@ There are a number of types of objects involved in making this work:
    relational database, stdout, a metric filterer, etc.
 
 Please see example.lua for a good example of using this pipeline.
+
+## Setup
+
+If you use a relational database metric destination, make sure to instantiate
+the schema provided in schema.sql first.