A data-loss bug is far more serious than anything about sorting. MySQL has an encoding called "utf8" -- if you can't count on it to round-trip UTF-8 data without data loss, that is a serious problem IMO, documented or not.
The real problem is that MySQL accepts and silently drops this data that it cannot handle. It has a nasty tendency to silently drop data rather than error out.
Really? I've done a lot of data importing into MySQL, and it always gives me a warning that tells me the invalid Unicode code point. It doesn't generate an error, but it definitely generates a warning. You need to make sure whatever client/library you're using is passing that on to you, though.
It doesn't generate an error, but it definitely generates a warning. You need to make sure whatever client/library you're using is passing that on to you, though.
That right there is the problem.
Other DBs, when you do something they can't handle, bail with a full-fledged error that stops what you're doing. MySQL doesn't do that for quite a few data-losing cases, and that's incredibly dangerous.
