Dear User Couch,

A project I work on is trying out couch and it's proving super so far so thanks 
a lot for that. I wonder whether you could provide some advice on one 
particular feature that we haven't figured out yet? It's such a basic 
requirement that I'm pretty sure there's something that we're just not getting 
- I know I'm a lot more used to thinking in SQL than map/reduce.

Suppose we buy an sell an awful lot of fruit, mostly apples and oranges but 
sometimes bananas, pears and anything else that shoppers want. We take a feed 
(from another system) of every trade and load them all into couch as we go 
along, then define a view to aggregate them up by various different aspects of 
the sale. We can control the grouping level to produce many different reports 
out the same view and it works very well for us. Some of the attributes on the 
trades documents are not on the original feed so we enrich the data before 
PUTting them in couch. This is also fine.

Unfortunately, sometimes the enrichment changes. For example each trade has a 
fruit field and we have a mapping from fruit to fruit type. Today apples, 
oranges and pears are classified as round fruit whereas bananas are long fruit 
so we can put a fruit type field on the document as we load it in but tomorrow 
that classification might change and pears might become lumpy fruit instead of 
round fruit. We could go back and update every pear trade in the database but 
we'd rather not have fruit type on the document at all and maintain a separate 
mapping "table".

We thought that perhaps the map function could reference another database that 
was keyed on fruit and had documents containing the fruit type but don't seem 
to be able to perform this lookup in the mapping. We could get the document 
itself on the result but not extract just one field to augment the original 
documents. We also considered generating the view's design dynamically out of a 
mapping table and replicating the mapping into explicit logic in the javascript 
but this seemed like an abuse.

In short, how would you implement a pre-aggregation lookup table?

Thanks,

Matt
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