Laravel/Eloquent Model query 'orderBy' does not seem to always work when the table contains a mysql geometry column

[TomasJohansson]

• Laravel Version: 8.9.0

• PHP Version: 7.4.3

• Database Driver & Version:

$ apt list --installed | grep "mysql"
default-libmysqlclient-dev/focal,now 1.0.5ubuntu2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libmysqlclient-dev/focal-updates,focal-security,now 8.0.21-0ubuntu0.20.04.4 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libmysqlclient21/focal-updates,focal-security,now 8.0.21-0ubuntu0.20.04.4 amd64 [installed,automatic]
mysql-common/focal,focal,now 5.8+1.0.5ubuntu2 all [installed,automatic]
php7.4-mysql/focal-updates,focal-security,now 7.4.3-4ubuntu2.2 amd64 [installed]

I can also mention that I am using mysql server 8.0.21 at my Linux Ubuntu 20.04 machine.

Description:

I have imported a shapefile (with 21 polygons) to a mysql table by using the tool ogr2ogr (version GDAL 3.0.4), but when trying to retrieve rows by using the Laravel/Eloquent model method 'orderBy' it does not work when sorting by a varchar field unless I remove most of the rows, though the method 'orderBy' does indeed work when sorting by the auto increment column.

Steps To Reproduce:

The shapefile (with counties of Sweden) I used which you also can use for reproducing the problem:
Download (2 MB) the zip file https://data.val.se/val/val2018/statistik/2018_valgeografi_lan.zip
(linked from this page https://data.val.se/val/val2018/statistik/index.html )
Unzip to a directory which will include some "alla_lan.*" files, e.g. the shapefile "alla_lan.shp".
(BTW, "alla län" is swedish for "all counties")
Create a mysql database (the name "YOUR_DATABASE" is used below) with enough permissions for "YOUR_USERNAME" to create a database table there with the below command.
ogr2ogr -f MySQL MySQL:YOUR_DATABASE,host=127.0.0.1,user=YOUR_USERNAME,password=YOUR_PASSWORD /YOUR_PATH_TO_THE_UNZIPPED_SHAPEFILE/alla_lan.shp -lco ENGINE=InnoDB -t_srs EPSG:4326
The above command should now have created a table "alla_lan" in "YOUR_DATABASE" with 21 rows.
The column SHAPE is a "geometry" (mysql type) column defining a geographic area (county) of Sweden (i.e. there are 21 counties in Sweden).

Create an Eloquent Model as below in a file:

<?php
namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class AllaLan extends Model {
	protected $table = "alla_lan";
}

Now try to use the "AllaLan" class as below from some test file (which also should include "use App\Models\AllaLan;") :

print("Rows when sorting by OGR_FID: "  . count( AllaLan::orderBy("OGR_FID", "asc")->get() ) );  # 21
print("Rows when sorting by lan_namn: " . count( AllaLan::orderBy("lan_namn", "asc")->get() ) ); # 0

The first row above is correct i.e. there are 21 rows in the table, but when sorting by another column the result is zero !

As mentioned there are 21 rows in the table, but if I remove many of them it works (to sort by "lan_namn") i.e. then the correct number is returned instead of zero.
For example, if I delete all but 5 rows like this with some mysql client:
delete from alla_lan where OGR_FID > 5;
Then it still does not work, but if I remove one more i.e. if I run this:
delete from alla_lan where OGR_FID > 4;
then it does work by correctly returning the now remaining 4 rows instead of returning zero.
print("Rows returned when sorting by lan_namn: " . count( AllaLan::orderBy("lan_namn", "asc")->get() ) ); # 4