How to force MySQL/MariaDB to show numbers in scientific notation?
Yes, this seems a known issue, which probably wasn't never acknowledged much because after all, in most cases, a float is displayed/processed by the application code and not represented directly by mysqld/mysql client (and seems that workbench suffers from the same problem).

Sheeri from Mozilla seems to have discovered this problem before when running pt-table-checksum and shows a workaround for its run, but not a general solution. However, on a further discussion, she seems to provide a possible option, although with the opposite format that you want (converted into decimal instead of scientific notation.

I have just arranged a quick calculation to generate the scientific format out of a decimal number, change @n for your column name in your case:

SET @n := 0.00123; 

SELECT 
   IF(@n=0, 0, 
       CONCAT(IF(@n&lt;0, '-', ''), 
              FORMAT(abs(@n)/pow(10, floor(log10(abs(@n)))), 6), 
              'E', 
              FORMAT(floor(log10(abs(@n))), 0)
             )
     ); 


EDIT: This is the function:

CREATE FUNCTION sci(n DOUBLE) 
RETURNS char(12) DETERMINISTIC
RETURN IF(n=0, '0.000000E0',
          CONCAT(IF(n&lt;0, '-', ''),
                 FORMAT(abs(n)/pow(10, floor(log10(abs(n)))), 6),
                 'E',
                 FORMAT(floor(log10(abs(n))), 0)
                )
         )