Moodle Upgrade and MySQL5.5

[CamelMan]

We have inherited a Moodle installation (Teacher ran it with help from a support company - company renewal was £3k, now IT run it) which is Moodle 3.5.14 and MySQL5.5 and Im looking to update it as its a few versions out. Checked out the upgrade instructions for 3.10 which seemed straightforward enough but when we started the upgrade we hit a pre-requisite for MySQL 5.7.

 

Its on Centos 6 - did a general Yum update but it didn't find anything new - read online that you needed to set a repository (mysql-community.repo) then edit the file to nominate which version (it seemed to generally indicate that you should go to 5.6 first) that downloaded but then MySQL threw an error when restarting. Didn't have much more time to look at it so just rolled it back in Veeam.

 

I've since read that there seems to also be a split into MariaDB which some folk recommend.

 

So I know its a bit old now but for those who support their own Moodle servers - did you have any issues MySQL5.5 -> MySQL5.6, did you flip to MariaDB and is there any guides or notes that helped? Also if there are any gotcha's or stuff to watch out for that would be great.

 

(Part of not renewing the contract is that most departments have jumped to Teams/SharePoint so Moodle is only used by a handful of people so it may be canned anyway after this year.)

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.