Students' Syntactic Mistakes in Writing Seven Different Types of SQL Queries and its Application to Predicting Students' Success

Abstract

The computing education community has studied extensively the errors of novice programmers. In contrast, little attention has been given to student's mistake in writing SQL statements. This paper represents the first large scale quantitative analysis of the student's syntactic mistakes in writing different types of SQL queries. Over 160 thousand snapshots of SQL queries were collected from over 2000 students across eight years. We describe the most common types of syntactic errors that students make. We also describe our development of an automatic classifier with an overall accuracy of 0.78 for predicting student performance in writing SQL queries.

Errors and Complications in SQL Query Formulation

“…Previous research [1,2,4,6,34,39] categorizes SQL errors under two classes: syntax and semantic errors. The division is intuitive because DBMSs detect syntax but not semantic errors.…”

“…However, Buitendijk [6] points out that it is possible for a user to commit a logical error, which results in the query being incorrect for the particular data demand. Smelcer [34] and Ahadi et al [1] propose that the semantically incorrect query is syntactically correct but returns information not intended by the user. Ahadi et al [3] state that a query with a semantic error produces either an empty result table or a result table that is not the same as desired.…”

“…Such studies contribute to increased understanding of the difficulties that users experience in the process of learning new languages [11]. Even though SQL was standardized by ANSI/ISO as early as 1986/1987 [14] and is used widely today, SQL has received less attention in educational research than programming [1].…”

“…SQL still lacks a unified error categorization, and error categorizations presented in previous studies [1,34,39] have focused on specific errors relevant only to each individual study or have allowed a specific database management system (DBMS) to perform the categorization. DBMSspecific SQL implementations differ from one another [31] and there exists no error categorization 39:2 T. Taipalus et al…”

SQL Logic Error Detection by Using Start End Mid Algorithm

“…On the other hand, logic error occurs if the syntax is correct but it does not produce the intended result [2]. It makes logic error more difficult to learn since there is no warning from compiler about occurred mistakes [3].…”