I have been evaluating swapping out MySQL with MariaDB. As advertised, so far it has been a pretty plug and play replacement. With one exception…

For some reason, our MySQL configuration file had the system variable old_passwords set to 1. No issues showed up when using the command line client.

However, when I tried to attach Tomcat to the database it failed. A quick web search showed that this is a well know issue and all that had to be done was upgrade the passwords.

References:
"Unable to load authentication plugin." when trying to connect to MariaDB
Upgrading passwords from old_passwords to "new passwords"