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 …

Hi, everyone. Just a quick note here to let you all know that we’ve just added Debian 8 support to our Apt repos. We have the latest MySQL Server 5.6 ready for you, as well as the latest 5.7 Development Milestone, and more of our products for Debian 8 are in our QA pipeline as […]

Over at the OPenARK blog Shlomi Noach argues that using apt-get or yum to install your MySQL instance will one day most likeley break your MySQL setup. Depdendencies, distros not shipping the MySQL version you want to use and on some distro's indeed the mysql vs MySQL issue, agreed, it all makes things less trivial.

However why give up a clean packaged system if there are other ways out ?

First of all by claiming that such an installation can break a working production environment looks to me like admitting you don't have a split development, production environment and that rather than testing stuff upfront indeed you just hack a long in production.

So rather than using a tarball for the MySQL instance an --force to satisfy the missing dependencies (hence also cluttering your system) , a much cleaner and less error prone setup …