How are you attempting to do this (browser UI, client tools, coding against
the SP API, etc)? It would be easy to do with custom code; you could just
iterate through the sites (SPWebs) in a site collection (SPSite). You'd
have to do some recursion to make sure you hit all possible levels, but that
should be a trivial exercise.

Our Network Admin staff was attempting to do this by running a select *
statement against of the SQL Server tables created by a SharePoint 2010
installation.



Apparently, we used a third party tool for migrating SharePoint
2003\2007 sites to our test SharePoint 2010 instance.



After the tool completed its migration process we do not see any
evidence via Central Admin that the migrated sites actually exist in
SharePoint 2010; therefore we decided to check the configuration and
content databases for any evidence of existence.



In addition, one of the SQL Server Administrators stated that the URL
columns are encrypted.

You can try SELECT FullURL FROM Webs; those values shouldn't be encrypted.

Am I missing something here? Why not just use the web service to pull the list
of webs?

I think a simple console app in c# that run on a server of the farm, takes all
webapp of the farm, site collections in web app, web in site collections and
report to a simple csv file is quite simple and can be done in less than half an
hour. The same can be done in powershell.

The SharePoint PowerShell cmdlet Get-SPSite returns just that, a list of URLs
for all sites in the farm.

I don't know how your tool works, but I migrated a 2007 site collection to 2010
recently. I had to create a root site collection prior, but after I had
attached the content database to the farm, the sites were available and listed
in Get-SPSite.