AnyData::Format::HTMLtable claims to support DBI directly:

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect ("dbi:AnyData:");
$dbh->func ("table1", "HTMLtable", $filename, "ad_catalog");
my $hits = $dbh->selectall_arrayref ("select name from foo where bar =
+ 42");
# ... other DBI/SQL operations
[download]

I never used it, but it sounds more or less what you are looking for.

What I've done is use a mojolicious backend, rendering a template which includes the JavaScript datatables (the data source being JSON delivered by Mojolicious) this both renders and scales well, and has the benefit of users being able to search within the results, sort by column etc. Perhaps this is along the lines of what you had in mind?

I've used this in the past (about 12 years ago):

Oooh .. this looks like the very thing. Thanks!

Alex / talexb / Toronto

Thanks PJ. We owe you so much. Groklaw -- RIP -- 2003 to 2013.

Question fuzzy, but random thought: maybe use Mojo::DOM (or whatever HTML parser you know) to scrape the table in question into a CSV format then pull things out with DBD::CSV behind DBI?

I have no solution really. In my experience html is a bit too variable. I can't find anything DBI-ey (also looked in https://pgxn.org/ - no luck ). Of course, to get database-access you could slurp either html (via curl) or cleaned-up text (via links -dump) into a table but they'd just be 'raw' lines that you'd still have to select the correct table rows from. Still, for well recognizable/greppable rows it might work. And anyway, it is a reminder that postgresql's COPY knows how to read input from another program's STDOUT.

create table temp_slurps (line text);

copy temp_slurps ( line ) from program 'links -dump -width 512 ${url}'
+;

select * from temp_slurps ; -- where ...
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As they say, YMMV. I'm sure if you write a postgres extension (for pgxn.org) to extract-'read' html-tables from source it will be popular ;)

If the latter is the case, you might be looking for XML based solutions.