MariaDB TIMESTAMP supports year values in the range 1970..2038, and after MDEV-32188 it's going to support year values in the range 1970..2106.

This range is still narrower than most other databases support:

For migration purposes, we need a data type which will cover at least the range -4713..9999.

It will need 5 bytes (instead of 4 bytes) to store the "number of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC" value.

Also, it will need a new C++ data type (instead of struct timeval) to transfer values inside the server.

struct {

  longlong tv_sec; -- signed, to store negative years

  uint32 tv_usec; 

};

This task is also a dependency for

• MDEV-15750 preserve MYSQL_TYPE_TIMESTAMP in temporal arithmetic

Using TIMESTAMP arithmetic for the current TIMESTAMP implementation is not very meaningful because of the too small TIMESTAMP range.