Why so many collisions with the MariaDB 10.2 RAND() function?

Question

Note: Running MariaDB 10.2.27 on Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard.

I wanted to generate random integers for use in MariaDB so I have been experimenting with the MariaDB R

Answer 1

Further experiments with 5.6's RAND indicate that it is good to only 30 bits. That is it has only about one billion distinct values.

File a bug with bugs.mysql.com and/or MariaDB.

30 bits is good enough for most applications. Of those applications for which it is not good enough, most people won't notice its wimpiness.

FLOAT has 24 bits of precision; DOUBLE has 53. So 30 needs DOUBLE, but fails to fill it up.