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Very rarely will users actually want to view an entire data set, most of the time it is expected for users to subset their data based on variables they are interested in researching. This brings up a couple interesting issues for users trying to access the data. If users are unfamiliar with the data source or variable names, how are they supposed to select the variables they are interested in? This may not be a big deal for small data sources, but do we really expect users to search through hundreds or thousands of variables on big data sources in order to find the variable they are interested in? To solve this problem, RDS leverages the documentation that administrators have added to provide enhanced selection capability. 

Step By Step

• Begin with a simple select query.

Variable Names

The first way RDS allows users to select variables is through the well known and traditional way of specifying variable names. If we know the variables we want to work with this is a great way to quickly subset our data. This is done through the use of the cols parameter, which takes a comma separated list of values.

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