MySQL or MariaDB is very popular opensource databases servers. While using these database servers we may need to know the version of the client or server. We can use features according to these version numbers. In this tutorial we will look how to list MySQL and MariaDB database server versions.

mysql –version Command

mysql is a client command used to connect and manage database server. We can use --version option in order to print the version of the mysql client. If the database service runs in the same system this will also print the server version too.

$ mysql --version

Package Manager

We can use package manager of the system. This can be apt , yum or dnf. In this case we will use apt with the show option .

$ apt show mysql-server

As we can see from line Version: the version is 5.7.23

MySQL Client

In the first connection of the MySQL server some basic information about the server is listed. MySQL server version is one of them. The line starting with Server version: will show the current version of the MySQL server.

$ sudo mysql -u root -p

Server Variables

MySQL server variables are stored  in the VARIABLES variable. We can use  VARIABLES and fileter for version information like and SQL statement.

> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "%version%";

As we can see also following information is provided too.

• innodb_version
• protocol_version
• tls_version
• version
• version_comment
• version_compile_machine
• version_compile_os

STATUS MySQL Command

MySQL also provides the STATUS command which is used to current status of the MySQL server. We can this command to print MySQL server version and other server related information like Connection, Current User, Connection Id etc.

> STATUS;

As we can see that following information is provided too

• Connection id
• Current database
• Current user
• SSL
• Server version
• Protocol version
• Connection
• Server characterset
• Db     characterset
• Client characterset
• Conn.  characterset
• UNIX socket
• Uptime
• Threads