Note that you only need to have the ASC and DESC versions of opclasses when you are going to use multicolumn indexes with some columns in ASC order and some in DESC order. For columns used by themselves in an index, you don't need to do this, no matter which order you are sorting on.
Yeah, I assumed the people 'in the know' on this kind of stuff would know the details of why I have to have those, and therefore I wouldn't have to go into detail as to why -- but you put your finger right on it. :) Unfortunately the customer this is for wants certain columns joined at the hip for querying and sorting, and this method was a performance godsend when we implemented it (with a C .so library, not using SQL in our opclasses or anything like that).
Steve
