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Validating MySQL version numbers

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As part of a MySQL 5.5 to MySQL 5.6 upgrade across several Ubuntu servers of varying distros an audit highlighted a trivial but interesting versioning identification error in Ubuntu’s packaging of MySQL.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep mysql-server-5.5
ii  mysql-server-5.5   5.5.41-0ubuntu0.12.04.1  ...

$ mysql -uroot -p -e "SELECT VERSION()"
+-------------------------+
| VERSION()               |
+-------------------------+
| 5.5.41-0ubuntu0.12.04.1 |
+-------------------------+

But when you look at the mysql --version it does NOT say 5.5.41.

$ mysql --version
mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.34, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 6.2

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

On 14.04 I get expected results.

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep mysql-server-5.5
ii  mysql-server-5.5       5.5.41-0ubuntu0.14.04.1   ...

rbradfor@rubble:~$ mysql -uroot -p -e "SELECT VERSION()"
+-------------------------+
| VERSION()               |
+-------------------------+
| 5.5.41-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 |
+-------------------------+

$ mysql --version
mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.41, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 6.3

Comments

  1. says

    It looks like you are comparing the version of the mysql server package against the output of VERSION(), which should match and against the version of the mysql client, which does not have to match.

    The version of the client package and the version of the client should match.

    Maybe there were changes in the requirements for the server package?

    What does apt-cache policy mysql-server / mysql-client say?