Dear MariaDB Developer Community,

I hope you are doing well.

I am Harshit Vijay Kumar, a final-year undergraduate student in Computer Science. I have been researching MDEV-36107 for GSoC 2025 and, during my exploration of operator operations in MariaDB, I came across some behaviors that caught my attention. To further investigate, I compared these behaviors with MySQL to understand their differences.

Observations:

(1) Handling Large Number Multiplications Using Exponents

Currently, multiplying two large integers results in an overflow, returning 0 instead of using an exponent-based representation.

SELECT 18014398509481984 * 18014398509481984;
MariaDB Output: 0

SQL Output: 3.2451855365842673e+32

Interestingly, if one of the operands is a floating-point number, the result is computed without overflow:

SELECT 18014398509481984 * 18014398509481984399405765456789087654390954.0;
Output: 324518553658426733978210646499548233026655740664701555572736.0

This inconsistency between integer-only and mixed-type operations is confusing. A standardized approach, possibly leveraging exponent notation, could improve clarity.

(2) Rounding Floating-Point Outputs

MariaDB currently returns full precision in floating-point calculations, which can lead to unnecessary precision in practical use cases.

SELECT 1.0376728938476536278903984765 + 1.039876453672890938476536278902345678908765434567890;
MariaDB Output: 2.07754934752054456636693475540234567891
SQL Output: 2.077549347520544

A rounding mechanism would allow for concise representation and reduce storage overhead, especially for users unaware of excessive precision in their datasets.

(3) Eliminating Unnecessary Zeros in Floating-Point Representation

SELECT 1.0000 * 1.0000000000;
MariaDB Output: 1.00000000000000

While useful in some cases, the inclusion of excessive trailing zeros unnecessarily increases storage usage. A more compact representation should be considered, where only significant digits are retained.

(4) Implementation of == Equality Operator

Currently, MariaDB allows the assignment operator (=) for comparisons. However, since = is primarily used for assignments, this dual-purpose behavior can be confusing.
Proposal: Introduce a dedicated == equality operator for clear and intuitive comparisons across INT, FLOAT, BOOL, and CHAR types.
Expected behavior:
- If values match → return 1
- If values don’t match → return 0

Testing & Next Steps

To implement these improvements, I plan to add test cases in mysql-test covering all edge cases for these operators. I will follow the approach used in the following implementations:

I would really appreciate your insights on these ideas. If any of these behaviors have intentional design choices, I would love to understand the rationale behind them.

Looking forward to your feedback!

Best Regards,

Harshit Vijay Kumar