mhansson/martin@linux-st28.site 50077b6db9 Bug #24791: Union with AVG-groups generates wrong results ...

The problem in this bug is when we create temporary tables. When
temporary tables are created for unions, there is some 
inferrence being carried out regarding the type of the column.
Whenever this column type is inferred to be REAL (i.e. FLOAT or
DOUBLE), MySQL will always try to maintain exact precision, and
if that is not possible (there are hardware limits, since FLOAT
and DOUBLE are stored as approximate values) will switch to
using approximate values. The problem here is that at this point
the information about number of significant digits is not 
available. Furthermore, the number of significant digits should
be increased for the AVG function, however, this was not properly 
handled. There are 4 parts to the problem:

#1: DOUBLE and FLOAT fields don't display their proper display 
lengths in max_display_length(). This is hard-coded as 53 for 
DOUBLE and 24 for FLOAT. Now changed to instead return the 
field_length.

#2: Type holders for temporary tables do not preserve the 
max_length of the Item's from which they are created, and is 
instead reverted to the 53 and 24 from above. This causes 
*all* fields to get non-fixed significant digits.

#3: AVG function does not update max_length (display length)
when updating number of decimals.

#4: The function that switches to non-fixed number of 
significant digits should use DBL_DIG + 2 or FLT_DIG + 2 as 
cut-off values (Since fixed precision does not use the 'e' 
notation)

Of these points, #1 is the controversial one, but this 
change is preferred and has been cleared with Monty. The 
function causes quite a few unit tests to blow up and they had
to b changed, but each one is annotated and motivated. We 
frequently see the magical 53 and 24 give way to more relevant
numbers.

2007-03-22 10:56:47 +01:00

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