Upgrading MariaDB 5.5 to 10.2 on CentOS 7

MariaDB as you may have already known is a community developed branch of popular opensource database engine MySQL. Since it’s inception MariaDB has swiftly surpassed most of its rivals and is now one of the most popular and actively maintained opensource database engines available. MariaDB offers all the features you know and love from MySQL in addition to several commercial grade additions contributing to tighter security, better overall memory management and performance. Current versions of MariaDB even offers built-in support for parallel replication.

The latest available version of MariaDB from the centos package manager (YUM) is version 5.5, consequently this is the most popular version of MariaDB installed on most CentOS web servers across the internet.
If you are running an older version of MariaDB we encourage that you follow the steps below for upgrading MariaDB from version 5.5 to the latest version (currently 10.2)

Upgrading MariaDB to version 10.2

First, goto MariaDB’s website and select your Distro, Release version and then finally the version of MariaDB you wish to have installed. It should look like this for CentOS:

We are working with CentOS 7 while the version of MariaDB we would like to have installed is MariaDB 10.2. After making the relevant selection we will be provided with some configuration code. Insert this into a new file under /etc/yum.repos.d/ called MariaDB.repo. Here’s what our configuration looks:

# MariaDB 10.2 CentOS repository list - created 2017-10-11 18:51 UTC
# http://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/
[mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = http://yum.mariadb.org/10.2/centos7-amd64
gpgkey=https://yum.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDB
gpgcheck=1

Installing MariaDB with YUM

With the repo file in place you can now install MariaDB with the following command:

sudo yum install MariaDB-server MariaDB-client

NOTES

1. If you have an older version of MariaDB installed, run yum remove mariadb before upgrading.
2. MariaDB-server will install the database server engine while MariaDB-client installs a client version. In some instances you may not want to have both the server and client installed on the same web server.