join tables question

[nelson guda]

Hi all,

I was looking into the JOIN feature.  In the reference it says "You  
cannot use joins to affect the look of a map."  Will there ever be a  
way to use a JOIN in this manner?  For example, it would be extremely  
useful to be able to create maps that use geographic data from an  
existing shapefile, modified by parameters from a dynamically created  
csv.

I know that you can do something similar fairly easily with postgis,  
but I am trying to find ways around postgis since it is so slow and  
requires a special server setup.

thanks,
nelson