I was getting trouble to have my pentaho (spoon) 7.1 connected to mysql 8. I tried to find a solution on the net but didn't encounter any. After putting it aside and then working on the installation of PhpmyAdmin, I found it also had errors when connecting to the same database. So I researched further and found out that mysql8 comes configured with a different charset than utf8 which causes errors in any client that tries to connect to it and doesn't have the charset set as default in the mysql installation. The solution was to the charset to utf8 in the my.conf and presto the issue disappeared. Here is the link to the solution :
Error message was :
Caused by: com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.MySQLNonTransientConnectionException: Could not create connection to database server.
Hope this can help someone out there. Cheers Saci
