In recent years, pair programming has become a widely used approach for development of information systems. According to a worldwide survey, 35 percent of 104 development projects reported using pair programming. However, previous studies have shown rather mixed results in terms of the effectiveness of pair programming, comparing to individual or independent programming. This paper, therefore, uses a lab setting to control some of the variables that appear to have caused conflicting results in earlier studies. Writing SQL Queries for given problem statements is selected as the task the subjects to solve. One key issue addressed is the distribution of work load among the pair programmers and the independent programmers. Another is communication among co-workers as would occur in a real-world system development environment. The results of this study indicate there is no significant difference in task performance pair programming and independent programming.