Top 5 Posts from a specific heading

Hi

I am running a hosted MS SQL version of the forum, and I am wondering if it is possible to show the top 5 posts from one particular heading on my home page.

I am after having a forum heading called NewsDesk where I can post news stories and then the title and post would appear on the home page via database query, and would allow the reader to click on a link at the bottom to take them to the topic area and post their comments to the news story.

However I dont know the table names or fields to be able to do this, and dont want to use the rss feed as the description contains data I dont need  posted by , date, subject all clumped together, I would like to format these seperately.

Has anyone done this before, so I am not reinventing the wheel ?

Thanks
Juz