This will provide us the address of the rpm to auto-configure the MySQL Community Server repository. We can also skip that step and just copy the link on “No thanks, just start my download”. Select “ Download” and you can choose to login or create an Oracle account.
At the moment of the writing of these lines, this version of the repository setup package is still in beta, but I had no problems to install it with several combinations of software and hardware. The first step is to setup Oracle’s MySQL repository, for that, we can go to the website, click on “ Downloads“, then “ Yum repository” and then “Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7”. You can use the following command: rpm -qa | grep -i mysql to check for MySQL packages that may be previously installed and you can delete them with the yum remove command. Please note that the following tutorial supposes that no previous version of MySQL or MariaDB is already installed.
The process we are about to show for CentOS 7 will be identical on RHEL 7 and, to some extent, other yum-based distributions like the latest versions of Fedora and Amazon Linux.
5.6 introduces a lot of improvements over MySQL 5.5, and given that Red Hat EL7 has a support cycle of at least ten years, it may become very outdated in the future.
In this tutorial we will show how to install MySQL 5.6 on CentOS 7, useful for those that prefer to deploy the latest MySQL GA release. The difference is that, of course, Oracle offers its latest MySQL version in yum repositories, and as a consequence, it is available for install on all Red Hat-compatible versions. This has the hilarious consequence that Oracle Linux actually distributes its competitor version, MariaDB on its repositories, with the aim of being 100% compatible. The biggest surprise is that Red Hat has opted to choose MariaDB 5.5, and not Oracle, as the default MySQL-like vendor. Regarding packages, the most impacting change is arguable the update of both MySQL and PostgreSQL versions, indeed in a need of an update, as the previous version of Red Hat, 6.5, still featured 5-year old versions of both RDBMSs, and both are currently in end of life support. Red Hat EL7 also includes Btrfs as a tech preview. There are very interesting changes for database administrators in these new releases, among which I would like to highlight the fact that installer now chooses XFS as its filesystem by default, which substitutes ext4 as the preferred format for local data storage.
The latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, one of the most popular and respected Linux distributions in the server market, was released in June 2014, followed by CentOS 7 and Oracle Linux releases in July of the same year.