>We have an application that gets its info from a SQL type server. The application has a clunky user interface, and I'd like to be able to write a bit of code to access the same data, but in a friendlier format. I'm just not sure what the name of the database/tables on this server are. Is there a piece of software that can 'detect' what strings are being sent to the server over a certain port?

Check SQL Server Profiler. I'm not sure how you can write any code if you've no idea what the data looks like.