At present I am displaying a list of the last 5 posts in a site\'s blog in its footer using this mysql query:
SELECT post_title, guid, post_date FROM wp_posts WH
The relations of the Wordpress database is available in the database diagram.
In your particular case it is:
wp_posts.ID
->wp_term_relationships.object_id
->wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id
->wp_term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id
->wp_term_taxonomy.term_id
->wp_terms.term_id
For querying you need to use an SQL join:
SELECT p.ID, t.term_id
FROM wp_posts p
LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships rel ON rel.object_id = p.ID
LEFT JOIN wp_term_taxonomy tax ON tax.term_taxonomy_id = rel.term_taxonomy_id
LEFT JOIN wp_terms t ON t.term_id = tax.term_id
But it should be noted that the wordpress database might change at any time, and you should use the Wordpress provided mechanisms (such as query_posts) to filter posts from the database.