Human factors comparison of a procedural and a nonprocedural query language
ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS)
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In spite of years of research aimed at improving database query languages (Boyle, Bury & Evey, 1983; Reisner, Boyce & Chamberlin, 1975; Thomas & Gould, 1975; Welty & Stemple, 1981; Welty, 1985), users still make mistakes. They consistently err when writing queries requiring information about two (or more) different entities, e.g., "What are the locations of all products?" Users not only have to learn a query language, but have to learn the structure of their data (called the user view of data) and then match the language with the data (Ogden, 1986). Current results (Smelcer & Mantei, 1984) indicate that designers and users of databases think about the same data differently; users expect the user view to be organized in one way, but it is actually organized in a different way. Database administrators need guidelines for creating user views of data, which enable users to more easily understand the organization of their data, and more easily write queries to access their data.