I'm developing a visualization application on SharePoint Enterprise 2010. This involves doing some SQL queries I would love to expose as external lists in SharePoint. All interfacing with the database which contains the data we want to analyze happens through Business Connectivity Services.
SharePoint designer easily lets you expose a single database table as an external content type/external list. The question is, is there an easy way to create an SQL query involving multiple tables where the result of the query becomes the contents of an external list? I'm pretty sure the third-party BCS Meta Man will let you do this, but is there an easy way to do it directly?