It's either not in the base repo / unmaintained quickly. I remember running MySQL on Debian / CentOS couple of years ago it was a joke how old the versions were.
You should always use the official repo ( with provided RPM / deb ) for that kind of app.
Example for CentOS 7.x:
yum info mysql-connector-java.noarch
Name : mysql-connector-java
Arch : noarch
Epoch : 1
Version : 5.1.25
Release : 3.el7
Size : 1.3 M
Repo : base/7/x86_64
Summary : Official JDBC driver for MySQL
