Mendeley is a nifty new tool for organizing and sharing academic references. I've been test driving it a bit, mainly using it to import files that I then transfer over to JabRef. This was working out alright, since Mendeley allows you to export to bibtex, which is the backend for JabRef and what I ultimately end up using to write my papers. I've been looking for a way to streamline this process, since I like Mendeley's interface a lot better and it has better search features, e.g. full-text search of all attached pdfs.
Unfortunately, Mendeley doesn't use bibtex for its backend, but it does use SQLite and will even let you export your database as a SQLite zip file. I can't seem to figure out where Mendeley stores my user files so far, so exporting seems the way to go.
Using the SQLite Database Browser, I managed to load up my Mendeley database. Things seem pretty obvious, with most of the things you'd want to futz with in the "Documents" table. For now I just removed all the citationKey values and generated my own the way that I wanted them, but it's nice to know that it's not too miserable to get at the raw data from Mendeley.
Note: You can also restore an edited zip of sqlite data, but you have to have it all flat, exactly the way that Mendeley exported it.
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