Hi jwyrocks,
this is caused by a change in the MySQL 8 driver and reported here. Starting with version 8 of the driver it always applies time zone adjustments. To do so it needs to know the time zone that is configured in the server side which is done during the connection. If the server time zone isn’t recognized the error you mention is thrown. If you want to use the MySQL 8 driver you can either configure the server time zone or use the serverTimezone parameter in the MySQL Connector node.
Another alternative is to use version 5 of the driver which is also shipped with KNIME for this reason. Version 5 doesn’t do any time zone conversions by default since the useLegacyDatetimeCode parameter is set to true by default.
Bye
Tobias
P.s. I also edited the title of the post to emphasis that this is a problem when connecting to MySQL. This way other people might find the post easier. I hope this is ok with you.