> You seem to be expecting a case insensitive sort, which you will not
> get unless you define such a collation or use the upper.

Not at all. All I was expecting is that doing "order by asterm
ascending, id ascending" on something that's "ordered by asterm
descending, id descending" would revert the order. I might e.g. have
an ordered-by-asterm-ascending,-id-ascending dataset like the following

asterm id
a 1
a 2
b 3
b 5
b 7
c 4
c 8

an order by asterm descending, id descending on that dataset should
return the converse order no matter what collation im using, shouldn't it?