At the IDL prompt, type dbhelp . This will list all database files in your path. One should be CABS . If it is there, type dbopen,'cabs' to open the database. To see what fields are available in the database, type dbhelp , or dbhelp,1 for more elaborate descriptions of the fields.
List is a vector with the indices of the stars selected.
You can search on any of the entries in the database, but searches on strings are slow, and searches on non-indexed values can also be slow. Once you have made your selection, you may want to print out certain parameters. Use the command dbprint,list,params , where list is the output from dbfind and params is a string list of parameters to output. IDL databasing is a powerful tool. There is a complete writeup on IDL databasing on the bookshelf in the lab.