by: If supplied, we are keeping track of the missings within the values of the by columns. In summary, by is included too.
na.strings: Strings that should be interpreted as missing. All spaces will be removed before we compare to na.strings. The default is c("",".") so say " . " is a missing by default.
quiet: Keep quiet? Default is not to.
as.fun: A function that will be run on the result before returning. If first input data set is a data.table, the default is to return a data.table, if not the default is to return a data.frame. Use whatever to get what fits in with your workflow. Default can be configured with NMdataConf.