The MySQL Engineering Team at Oracle is excited to announce availability of Yum repositories for MySQL, making new releases of MySQL Database and related products easily accessible using Yum.

This initial release is focused on EL6-based distros as well as Fedora 18 and 19, and provides easy access to the most recent GA releases of our most popular products:

• MySQL Database 5.6
• MySQL Workbench 6.0
• MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.2

We expect to expand this in the future to offer additional MySQL products and versions using these repositories, as well as repositories for additional Linux distributions.

This effort benefits both end users and Linux distributions.  Users will have additional choice in deploying specific versions of MySQL products using their favored package manager, while Oracle helps reduce overhead in packaging MySQL for specific distributions.  For users, the benefits are:

• Ability to get MySQL components not yet packaged by their Linux distro.
• Access to the latest and greatest versions of MySQL, even if they have not yet been adopted by their Linux distro.
• Packages of MySQL products supported by Oracle.
• Easy early access to pre-GA product releases, such as MySQL 5.7 Development Milestone Releases.

Equally important in driving this effort is our continued and expanding commitment to Linux distributions.  For this audience, the key benefits are:

• Increased attention to packaging needs and concerns at Oracle means fewer opportunities for changes to be introduced which cause downstream packaging problems without awareness first at Oracle.
• Maintainers have access to our packages as a template for solutions to packaging issues.
• Oracle will have increased, distribution-specific experience and knowledge to draw upon in support of maintainer requests.
• Packaging work will start before product GA at Oracle, allowing packaging to mature concurrently with the product it supports.

We're excited to get MySQL 5.6 – the best release of MySQL Database ever – into the hands of more users, and to invest more in supporting maintainers in their efforts to package MySQL products for use within their Linux distributions.  These packages have been extensively tested internally, fully supported, and install fully tested and supported MySQL products.  Listed below are several resources you may find useful in deploying MySQL using the Yum repositories:

• Repo package download
• Installing MySQL from Yum repository manual page
• Install & Repo forum
• Report bugs regarding repo packaging on bugs.mysql.com.

Please let us know about your experiences with these new repositories, as well as any suggestions you may have to improve the experience.  We welcome feedback – both bug reports and feature requests – via bugs.mysql.com (there is a new "MySQL Repositories" category).