In addition to helping focus the analysis, a setup similar to Table 9-5 naturally allows us to calculate anticipated change with a greater degree of accuracy. For example, if we believe through increased parallelism the Load step's write time can be reduced by 50%, we can easily adjust the table and recalculate the response time. So not only does this table help us understand the situation, target our efforts, and communicate the situation to others, it also aids in anticipating performance improvements.

To help understand the complexity of working on each step, additional columns can be helpful. For example, the table could also include the number of top SQL statements and some complexity metric. The point is that the table should encourage fruitful discussion and analysis, so an informed decision can be made about where to target the performance effort.

There are two significant differences in capturing response time information when focused on a batch process: client process time and background process time.