With the Database Activity there still seems to be a problem importing UTF-8 files with BOM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_mark).
See this forum discussion for an example in Hebrew
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=62251#p559428
I have already created a UTF-8 and BOM stub for collecting more information on this topic.
Obviously the problem seems to stem from the fact that some external applications (OpenOffice Calc in the above mentioned case) insert a BOM into UTF-8 files which Moodle can't handle.
See also this tracker issues regarding UTF-8 and BOM:
http://tracker.moodle.org/secure/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&&query=bom&summary=true&description=true&body=true&sorter/field=updated&sorter/order=DESC
Frank
BOM encoding is a real nuisance. See http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=83130
Thanks for the hint! I added the w3.org link mentioned there to UTF-8 and BOM.