Emergency SharePoint document retrieval

For whatever reason your SharePoint server is dead. The database checks out ok and is still accessible but you cannot get the portal to load and need to extract a critical document for an executive meeting 5 minutes from now.  By default, SharePoint stores documents in the SQL Server database as BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) and cannot be easily exported without assistance from the presentation tier.

Pascal Gill decided to write a custom application to solve this very problem and did so handily. His creation, SharePoint Database Exporter, can connect directly to the WSS_Content database and provides the ability to save any stored version of any document in the database in its native format. This includes the ability to capture custom lists, metadata, and even web parts.

Simply launch the utility (a single, self-contained executable), log in to the database, find the content you need to extract, and save it off somewhere. Done. Clean, simple, incredibly effective.

http://blog.dreamdevil.com/index.php/2007/03/13/sharepoint_2003_database_exporter/