Installing MySQL 5.6 on CentOS 6

MySQL on CentOS6 is currently limited to version 5.1, which sucks. A lot of modern web applications can benefit of running the most recent version of MySQL (up to 5.6 at the writing of this post), and as a result we will be installing MySQL 5.6 on CentOS 6.x, patched to the latest sub-version.

There are several ways of accomplishing this, but I think it's a good idea to take the software directly from the source.

It's also a pretty good idea to have a backup mechanism, and sadly the free version does not play well with hot backups, which are performed while the database is running in full read/write made.

Percona has a wonderful set of tools, and offer a free hot backup solution for MySQL that works awesomely. I'll provide the instructions to install the tool, you can feel free to peruse their docs to implement your own backup strategy :)

More on Percona Xtrabackup here: http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/2.2/
More on MySQL Community Server here: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/


0. Got root/sudo

1. Get and Install the RPM from MySQL/Oracle

cd /tmp
wget  http://dev.mysql.com/get/mysql-community-release-el6-5.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh mysql-community-release-el6-5.noarch.rpm

2. Install MySQL and start / enable service

yum install mysql-community-server 
service mysqld start && chkconfig mysqld on

3. Secure MySQL server

./usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

4.  Install Percona with repos

rpm -Uvh http://www.percona.com/downloads/XtraBackup/XtraBackup-2.2.9/binary/redhat/6/x86_64/percona-xtrabackup-2.2.9-5067.el6.x86_64.rpm

 Verify successful install and check version

xtrabackup --version

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