Hi Al,
If your instance uses a MySQL database this is possible by having PHP access the database directly. You'll just need to know a bit about the database structure to correctly form your query.
With derby - because it is a single-user database - you can't go direct. There is the HTTP data publisher, which sends data somewhere else, but you already know about that. There are also remote views, but they display values by manipulating the DOM with Javascript, so that likely won't work for you either.
I'm assuming that you want to get these values into another system for some reason, rather than just having them display on a web page somewhere. Is that the case?