How to workaround the MySQL V8 Authentication plugin ‘caching_sha2_password’ cannot be loaded

Symptom

When you use MySQL V8 and tried to connect to the Database from Exploratory, you might see an error like below

Failed to connect to abcdefghijk
Error in .local(drv, ...) : Failed to connect to database: Error: Plugin caching_sha2_password could not be loaded: The specified module could not be found.

Workaround

Use mysql_native_password

To workaround this, you can use mysql_native_password instead of the V8 default caching_sha2_password by executing SQL command below. (Replace <username> and <password> with your actual username and password)

ALTER USER '<username>' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY '<password>';

There is a stackoverflow question Authentication plugin ‘caching_sha2_password’ cannot be loaded that that you can check more details.