User performance differences between relational and entity relationship models: A summary review of the literature

Abstract

There are differing views on the importance of the differences between the relational model and the entity relationship (ER) model. The actual impact of the model differences on user performance is reported here. A summary of the very few experiments that compared user performance for the ER model and the relational model is presented. The overall result from the experiments is that user performance is usually better, and often significantly better, with the ER model than with the relational model.