Hello Bar, As you have done the work on store_native and val_native, I would especially like to know your thoughts with regards to how to expose these to the SQL layer. In my particular case, I'd like to re-work the "Add FLOAT and DOUBLE data interchange functions" patch ( https://github.com/ericherman/mariadb-server/commit/dcc7ccf65689bd7d84bef37c... ) to use these new API functions. I've only just started on this task ( https://github.com/ericherman/mariadb-server/tree/10.4-eherman-float-native ) and first thing that I need to figure out is how to write the tests. In commit 34eb98387f8f46a80fb053081dbe20d415f23b39 ( MDEV-13995 MAX(timestamp) returns a wrong result near DST change ), I see that in tests the SQL calls various time functions which ultimately call into these functions, yet I do not see any way to access these two new functions directly. Are you thinking of adding new SQL functions to expose the underlying bytes to the user? If not, I have a sense that casting to and from BINARY could expose the native byte arrays, but I'm not sure if that's the direction you imagine. If you tell me which direction to go, I will try to make that happen. Cheers, -Eric Other foo_native related commits: * commit a8a757c6bb32bbf291afdf33df861127489889ab wl#173 - temporal types with sub-second resolution * commit c353b2a8fc10e16107ee6c7e26877f4243d4eaef MDEV-17979 Assertion `0' failed in Item::val_native upon SELECT with timestamp, NULLIF, GROUP BY --