Accessing Drupal database for read purposes I'm interested in analyzing various aspects of the content in our Drupal site involving node meta data such as type, name, creation date, etc. I know I can create views to show some informaiton and I know I can dump out the database and analyze it separately, but I'd really like to query the database live (for read purposes only) from a remote machine so that I can use the software of my choice to do the analysis, reporting, etc.

Does Drupal have a remotely accessible API that I can use query its database?

(Note: I suspect the "db-api" tag is inappropriate for this question, but I couldn't figure out anything else to use.)
If you want easily importable data, consider using Views data export:


  This module is designed to provide a way to export large amounts of data from views. It provides a display plugin that can rendered progressively in a batch. Style plugins are included that support exporting in the following types:
  
  
  CSV
  Microsoft XLS
  Microsoft DOC
  Basic TXT
  XML
  


You can import CSV or XML to pretty much any data analysis tool you may need.