>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?

You can do this with a packet-sniffer and then some log analyzer software to decode the packets. I suppose since you know which port to look at it wouldn't be to difficult - but still a major pain in the neck to do such stuff. Surly there is someone there that knows what's on the server or has access to it?