Why is equals involving MariaDB JSON not reflexive? - mariadb

Question

The following MariaDB statement uses JSON_EXTRACT to turn the JSON-escaped string a into a JSON-typed value, and then this value is compared to itself. The comparison comes up as not equal. I thought that equality was reflexive (barring tricky things involving NULL and NaN), that is, a value is always equal to itself. What am I misunderstanding?
SELECT
JSON_EXTRACT('"a"', '$'),
JSON_EXTRACT('"a"', '$') =
JSON_EXTRACT('"a"', '$');
Server info:
Server: Localhost via UNIX socket
Server type: MariaDB
Server connection: SSL is not being used Documentation
Server version: 10.6.7-MariaDB-2ubuntu1-log - Ubuntu 22.04
Protocol version: 10
User: phpmyadmin#localhost
Server charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8mb4)

Answer 1

Apparently the solution is to use JSON_EQUALS(), which was added in MariaDB 10.7. I don't have an instance of MariaDB 10.7 so I can't test it, and dbfiddle only goes up to MariaDB 10.6.
You can, however, unquote the JSON to extract the string value, and test for equality.
SELECT
JSON_UNQUOTE(JSON_EXTRACT('"a"', '$')) AS a,
JSON_UNQUOTE(JSON_EXTRACT('"a"', '$')) =
JSON_UNQUOTE(JSON_EXTRACT('"a"', '$')) AS `a=a`;
a
a=a
a
1
https://dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=mariadb_10.6&fiddle=6fa8c7156e6fe9213bfbf44dd57e2c63