Question: speaking of ordering, does anyone know what's the collation used for ordering?

@agartha what do you mean with this question?

Which collation (set of rules) does orderBy use, like case sensitive, accent sensitive, unicode ordering, etc. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144250(v=sql.105).aspx

is utf8 a valid answer here? 😛

Nope...

I'm pretty sure it is

utf8_general_ci

Ouch... okay. Thanks for looking that up