Extended empirical evaluation of a visual environment for analyzing the structure of relational databases

Abstract

We present a visual framework for understanding the structure of a relational database. The framework provides coordinated visualization of the database structure and of various implicit relationships among its relations. The main objective of this paper is to report an extended version of the experimental evaluation which aimed at complimenting the previously reported pilot evaluation on the usefulness of the visual framework in understanding various associations among relations. Results obtained from the extended evaluation reported in this paper also seemed to suggest that the visual features provided by the prototype system offer a high level of help to users in instantly recognizing indirect associations, such as path views, among relations.