Hello Michael,
No, should not be anything special.
But why don’t you use MySQL connection instead of ODBC?

ODBC connection works for me, what error message do you get when you try to connect?

Sergey, Yes, using Valenina's build in mySQL connection seems the simplest and most direct, but when it failed I went to ODBC which fails oo. See is the screen with error with mySQL connector in V:

Thank you, so the problem is that MySQL 8.0 uses a different authentication plugin, not supported by MariaDB client used in the Valentina Studio.

Here's the discussion
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49194719/authentication-plugin-caching-sha2-password-cannot-be-loaded

While it is not supported and we're working on fixing it, you can create a new user which uses an older plugin
CREATE USER 'username'@'ip_address' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'user_password';

Or alter an existing
ALTER USER 'username'@'ip_address' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'user_password';