I stand to accuse CentOS 7 repositories for being outdated. I installed mariadb for local development, when all of a sudden I decided to use full text mysql queries and it turns out the mysql version i was using did not support it. The requirement was to upgrade from MariaDB 5.5 to MariaDB 10.x. Once that was done, I experienced the error message:
Access Denied for user ..FATAL ERROR: Upgrade failed while upgrading from mariadb 5.5
To solve the error, run the following commands:
sudo mysql_upgrade -p
Supply your password when prompted.
And that’s all. You should now have a working upgrade from MariaDB 5.5 on CentOS 7.