Completely remove MariaDB or MySQL from CentOS 7 or RHEL 7

These steps are working on CentOS 6.5 so they should work on CentOS 7 too:

(EDIT – exactly the same steps work for MariaDB 10.3 on CentOS 8)

1. yum remove mariadb mariadb-server
2. rm -rf /var/lib/mysql If your datadir in /etc/my.cnf points to a different directory, remove that directory instead of /var/lib/mysql
3. rm /etc/my.cnf the file might have already been deleted at step 1
4. Optional step: rm ~/.my.cnf
5. yum install mariadb mariadb-server

[EDIT] – Update for MariaDB 10.1 on CentOS 7

The steps above worked for CentOS 6.5 and MariaDB 10.

I’ve just installed MariaDB 10.1 on CentOS 7 and some of the steps are slightly different.

Step 1 would become:

yum remove MariaDB-server MariaDB-client

Step 5 would become:

yum install MariaDB-server MariaDB-client

The other steps remain the same.