How would I go about extracting the data from a DB into fields? I would like to display information on a page using Views, but the information isn't on the website, instead it is in a separate database. Is this possible?
I get that in order to use Views I need to have fields, but how do I extract this?
If you just want the content, you can use Feeds as Patrick said but this will replicate the content of the other database as entities in your Drupal site.
If you really want views connecting to a remote database, this question looks like a duplicate of:
https://drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/3275/how-do-i-display-an-external-database-data
This will help you make Drupal "aware" of the external db:
If you can get the data from the database in CSV or OPML format, you can use the Feeds module. It's quite complex to set up, but it does have decent documentation.
Consider the Forena module (disclosure: I'm a co-maintainer of it), here is a summary of it:
Forena is built of the idea of using SQL to get data out of a database and use XHTML and CSS to format it into web reports.
Various DBMSs are supported, such as Oracle, MS Sql, Postgress, SQLite, MySQL, any PDO compliant DBMS ... And there are quite some reasons for considering Forena.
Refer to the example in my answer to How to retrieve data directly from a Drupal database to get an idea about using Forena, i.e.:
Forena can also be used for importing data (from an external database ...) into a Drupal site, using its integration with the feeds module. Or you can use its integration with the views module to create views about data retrieved from such external database.
Refer to the available community documentation for (way) more details, and/or the sample reports and graphs in the demo site (which processes data stored in an SQLite database, one of the supported DBMSes).
The data module would help you to achieve what you are looking for.
Here is a quote about it (from the module's project page):
... helps you model, manage and query related sets of tables. It offers an administration interface and a low level API for manipulating tables and accessing their contents. Data module provides Views integration for displaying table data and Drupal search integration for searching table content.
