[BeeOnRope]

Sure but either you are talking about a fixed normalization algorithm which is not locale aware, in which case it doesn't solve the locale-specific unique key issue, or it is locale-aware and hence suffers the same problem with time-varying behavior.

[jrochkind1]

You are using string/text values as a pk and trying to sort on em? I'd say this is another reason not to do that.

[BeeOnRope]

Well I am not doing any of the things in the comment chain leading up to this, but probably the mention of primary key was a red herring. The GP's [1] point was that some index constraint (they mentioned PK uniqueness, but it could really be any constraint) might not be correctly maintained if the DB was not aware of the correct collation order. So from the point of view of the renderer, which is locale aware and uses locale-based collation, the DB is violating the constraints.

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[1] The GP relative to my reply