I have a project where we have a legacy system built in Drupal 6 that has been heavily customized, with much of the data stored in custom tables. We are currently planning a D6 to D7 upgrade, but we have an immediate need to access that data in a Drupal 7 instance, leaving the D6 site intact for now.
I would like to access that data using Drupal Entities and wrap each D6 table in a Drupal 7 Entity; however I'm having trouble making that work since the underlying assumption with the Entity API is that the data is stored in the local database, and this database is remote. We can access the database directly from the Drupal 7 instance, and I have the database credentials loaded in settings.php. I can query the data using Database::getConnection('default', 'legacy')->select(), so I know my connection is good; however I have no idea how to go about structuring an Entity class so that I can leverage EFQ, Views, etc. on this data.
I looked at Remote Entity API, but I"m not dealing with a RESTful service here, I have a direct connection to the D6 database.
Any assistance or hints would be greatly appreciated. I've worn Google out.