Completely remove MariaDB or MySQL from CentOS 7 or RHEL 7

Question

I installed MariaDB on CentOS 7 but I had some problems with some configuration, now it is completely misconfigured.

Thus, I wanted to remove the MariaDB with “yum remo

Answer 1

To update and answer the question without breaking mail servers. Later versions of CentOS 7 have MariaDB included as the base along with PostFix which relies on MariaDB. Removing using yum will also remove postfix and perl-DBD-MySQL. To get around this and keep postfix in place, first make a copy of /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient.so.18 (which is what postfix depends on) and then use:

rpm -qa | grep mariadb

then remove the mariadb packages using (changing to your versions):

rpm -e --nodeps "mariadb-libs-5.5.56-2.el7.x86_64"
rpm -e --nodeps "mariadb-server-5.5.56-2.el7.x86_64"
rpm -e --nodeps "mariadb-5.5.56-2.el7.x86_64"

Delete left over files and folders (which also removes any databases):

rm -f /var/log/mariadb
rm -f /var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log.rpmsave
rm -rf /var/lib/mysql
rm -rf /usr/lib64/mysql
rm -rf /usr/share/mysql

Put back the copy of /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient.so.18 you made at the start and you can restart postfix.

There is more detail at https://code.trev.id.au/centos-7-remove-mariadb-replace-mysql/ which describes how to replace mariaDB with MySQL