@Spuds I'm not sure which is best right now, because it also occurred to me (coffee!) that there is value in parametrizing which col is ordered by. I still think we want a default with order, not without, so perhaps you're right in your proposal and I'm too sleepy to look over atm. Could we consider it simply: at next pass through these functions, we could refactor to choose the most sensible default, in the idea that the client will need the simplest call (so there are defaults), and where it makes sense to vary the col for order, add it to the param, where it doesn't, don't add it. The simplest thing is param = 'DESC' alone.