For the impatient:

# echo -e "deb http://repo.mysql.com/apt/debian/ stretch mysql-5.7\ndeb-src http://repo.mysql.com/apt/debian/ stretch mysql-5.7" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mysql.list
# wget -O /tmp/RPM-GPG-KEY-mysql https://repo.mysql.com/RPM-GPG-KEY-mysql
# apt-key add /tmp/RPM-GPG-KEY-mysql
# apt update
# apt install mysql-server

In the latest stable version of Debian, if you ask to install mysql-server, you now get installed mariadb automatically, with no (evident) way of installing Oracle’s MySQL. Any major version upgrade has to be done carefully (not only for MariaDB, but also for MySQL and Postgres), and I bet that a MySQL 5.5 to MariaDB 10.1 will cause a huge confusion. Not only it will fail user expectations, I think this will cause large issues now that MariaDB has chosen to become a “hard” fork, and become incompatible in many ways with MySQL. Not only the server upgrade will cause user struggle, the connector is …