Internationalization

I'm thinking that this should be approached in a slowly descending set
of changes.

1/ Make individual databases possible with a single instance that can be
different encoding AND locale/sorting, and all other aspects of using
the encoding/langauge rules.
2/ Then tables.
3/ Then columns.
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So,for the first one,
Is there anyway for a single statement to access more than one database?
Could a query, regexes, etc be facing indexes in different
encodings/sorting collations if different databases in a cluster had
different encodings/collations?