drupal creating database queried pages

I'm starting to learn drupal and hopefully this is a easy newbie question for you to answer but my firm basically has a very large data set and I want to present it to the public.

We do research on firms and have a database with a company name and all the data we have about the firm(its mainly numbers/estimates). So is there a way to create a view that does this for us?

Creating individual pages is not very practical since we have several thousand companies we have studied over the years.

If there isn't anything easy, then is it possible to create a php page that takes the company name from the url and then queries the database and presents all the data to users?

Take a look at the views module. It can take a bit of work to customize it for a specific database, but is very flexible once you do.