Is it possible to get database contents from any website without having DB access ?

Question

I want to retrieve the database contents from a website and use it in another website. Is it possible to access the database contents using any scripts ? There are totally 500 + products in the website and they are going to remove those contents now. So before they remove them i want to download all the data and host it in my website. It is not possible to visit each and every page and write down the products information. It will be helpful if I get any kind of script to access the database and download all of them in a specified format.

For eg: We have leech software for forums to get content from another forums.

Answer 1

if you have any permition to that sites or you are administrator of that site, may be you can SQLdumb or any package for dumping data. But if have not a permittion you cant do that.

Answer 2

No, it is not possible. I would recommend trying to get in contact with the site owner and explain why you want their database and such and they may let you have it. Otherwise your best bet is to crawl the site and get a copy of every page and then manually populate(or attempt to automate it somehow) your own database from it.

Answer 3

No!!!!The question is not whether it is possible or not. It is whether you are allowed to copy from the site or not.

You cannot connect to the databse without the details.

Why don't you contact the website owners to send you the data they are going to remove it anyway?

Answer 4

I'm assuming you don't have administrative privileges to their site, in which case you can't just issue queries to their database. Their web page acts as a front-end to the database (and their business logic) thus preventing users from ever interacting directly with the data. That set-up is intentional.

The leech software you mention is generally implemented as a scraper of sorts. It downloads the contents of a forum as just a webpage, no different from how a search engine would crawl the Internet. If need be, the leech might store/mimic a cookie in case the forum requires a logged-in user. But in no case does the leech access the site's underlying database.

So your choices are to either write your own crawler, or email the site's administrator (as others have suggested). I'm not going to get into the issues of whether what you're asking for can be considered fair use; you should any legal ramifications before you attempt scraping.