I was referring more to my home-brew mapping idea, which isn't terribly portable. I have found a few items that I'll be sending on to the module author however.
For the curious:

• It requests every row of the table, but often you can select only row with id_column >=start_id (most systems will not have older nodes as replies to newer ones.) It can happen, so this should be some sort of flag
• It orders those rows by data_column, which also may not be desired. sort_column should be given, and if blank, this line can be dropped, presumably improving speed.
• With all of these flags flying around, (it already had a limit option and a match option) it may be easier to drop in an anonymous hash with these options set
• A slight internal change should allow access to more than one data column.