Data are provided for academic use only, and access is restricted to the faculty and doctoral students in Columbia Business School. On this homepage, you can find all neccessary CRSP Documentations for download. The two documents that might concern you most are CRSP Data Description Guide for stock files and CRSP Monthly US Treasury Guide for the bond files. There are some files small plain text files. Some CRSP files have a filesize well above this limit.
Some files are small plain text files.
A sample program is not needed for such files. These programs contains good amount of instructions and are self-explanatory. The SAS data files enable one to analyze CRSP data while working within a language that has both very strong database capability and excellent statistical support. If you are already familiar with the SAS system, you should find it relatively easy to access CRSP data since it's organized as SAS data files. The general user is encouraged to learn SAS as it is extremely powerful for handling very large datasets.