I'm just picking up development in CakePHP right now so forgive me if this seems obvious; it did to me when I first read about has, belongsTo, hasMany, etc.

The problem is I would like to associate two tables with a single model, and was wondering if there was a way to configure this so that when CakePHP did it's queries it automatically performed a join on the two tables.

I don't want to create a separate model for the second table as it is merely a meta information table - the master table will contain the primary information required, the meta table will be populated with secondary information that is not required and therefore may or may not be set for every row of the master table.