Take a look at Table Wizard (http://drupal.org/project/tw).  Assuming your tables have been defined with a schema it does a reasonable job letting you expose a table to views.  I started with that until I wanted to relate to a node.  In theory you can define the node table and then do a relation, but in practice when I did it so confused views that you couldn't create a node view any more, it had replaced node views with array (pretty sure it was a bug, but I didn't feel like finding/fixing it).  If you don't need a relationship to nodes, Table Wizard might be what you want.

Gregg

From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org] On Behalf Of Wipe_Out
Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2011 3:43 AM
To: support@drupal.org
Subject: Re: [support] Accessing non-drupal tables with Views?

On 23 October 2011 04:00, Gregg Marshall <mimlist@repconnection.com> wrote:

There is documentation for views 3 (sort of) in the advanced help.  But if you don't want to implement that module there's a copy on line, the page you are looking for is at http://views-help.doc.logrus.com/help/views/api-tables which helped but is a bit confusing (and possibly  not complete), but when supplemented by this issue, http://drupal.org/node/370013, especially the PATCH in it, I was able to get something working using hook_views_data.

Gregg

Thanks Gregg.. Looks like I have some work to do (I'm not really a coder)..

Kind of wish there was a module to enable access to other tables.. Maybe one day.. :)