Upgrading Percona Server - Moving to yum repository

MySQL & MariaDB Other MySQL® Questions
1

When we first installed Percona Server there was no yum repository. Now we’re upgrading an old system and would like to switch to the repository. We’re currently running 5.1.36-percona-log installed from rpms (not the repository) and are looking to just upgrade within the 5.1.x family right now to 5.1.68.

Here’s our current installation details.



	# yum list | grep percona


	MySQL-client-percona.x86_64 5.1.36-6.rhel5 installed


	MySQL-devel-percona.x86_64 5.1.36-6.rhel5 installed


	MySQL-server-percona.x86_64 5.1.36-6.rhel5 installed


	MySQL-shared-percona.x86_64 5.1.36-6.rhel5 installed

Can I simply install from the repository and it will overwrite the existing installation?

Or, do I need to remove the current installs, install from the repo, and then repopulate my databases from a backup?

2

Wow, 5.1.36 is really an old version!
Note that in later versions, we changed the package name from MySQL-server-percona to Percona-Server-server-51, hence you cannot just do yum update to upgrade those.

So the proper way to make the upgrade is to remove those packages manually:
rpm -e MySQL-client-percona
rpm -e MySQL-server-percona
rpm -e MySQL-shared-percona
rpm -e MySQL-devel-percona

and just install the new ones:
yum install Percona-Server-server-51

You can save your my.cnf before this though to be on safe side. There is no need to recover your data from backup, removing rpms won’t touch your data. But making a full backup before this kind of operations is always recommended!
Also you should run mysql_upgrade after new version is installed and running.