MySQL Gotchas

If you choose one of the higher settings, like Medium it will add requirements such as a special character. The step from low to medium adds a significant amount of complexity and this additional requirement might be too much. I have found in my testing that special characters can cause an issue with logging in and I recommend disabling this if you decide to use Medium. The additional aspect of upper, lower and numerical requirements in the password along with a longer password, will meet these requirements. To disable a specific requirement for a password policy once it has been set you can modify the configuration file and add the following line. 

Find the mysqld header and add the following two lines under it. 

To change the running value on the server, execute this query. 

To see your existing policies, you can execute this query on your server. 

It will return a similar set of results like this. You can see the value we set in the 

Password policy options

LOW policy tests password length only. Passwords must be at least 8 characters long. 

MEDIUM policy adds the conditions that passwords must contain at least 1 numeric character, 1 lowercase character, 1 uppercase character, and 1 special (nonalphanumeric) character. 

STRONG policy adds the condition that password substrings of length 4 or longer must not match words in the dictionary file, if one has been specified.