Australian Bureau of Statistics
Celebrating the International Year of Statistics 2013

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Short Cuts

Short Cuts is an irregular feature providing tips for CURF users and Contact Officers. In this issue we provide answers to some frequently asked RADL questions:

1. What should I do before commencing analysis of CURFs in RADL?

Prior to submitting your code and commencing your analysis. all users should:

• read the RADL home page information, including any RADL Alerts
• click on the RADL Help link on the navigator on the left of the page and read:
  • 'Information for all RADL Users' - this provides general information for the statistical language you will use
  • 'CURF Documentation' links - this provides the CURF's Technical and Information Papers, Unit Identifiers, CURF 'shortname' and frequencies for the CURF.

It is a requirement that all Unit Identifiers are retained on your saved unit record datasets, even though some of them may not be needed for your analysis. A list of Unit Identifiers can be found for each CURF in the RADL Help pages under 'CURF documentation'. To find these pages see the answer to question 1 above.

3. Why can't I see my approved CURFs in RADL?

There are two possible reasons:

• The ABS implemented several RADL system changes in late 2010. These included changes to the format of the "New Requests" page and it is now necessary to select the language you want to use before your approved CURFs list will appear for selection.
• Additional RADL user IDs are allocated to approved users wishing to access the 2004-05 NATSIH, or 2002 and 2008 NATSISS CURFs. Some users will have user identifiers ending with "_STATE" or "_REM". If you have one of these user IDs you should log in with each of your user IDs to check whether the CURF you want to use is attached to your other ID.

When users submit a 'normal' job, RADL will try to process the job for 10 minutes before timing out. Some complex jobs will take longer than this, so users can submit jobs as 'long' jobs and RADL will then queue them for later processing. Some of these longer jobs may need to run for a number of hours. An alternative to running a 'long' job is to split your code into several smaller jobs. Users can submit jobs using 'normal' timing in the first instance, as most jobs will be completed in less than 10 minutes.