I've got a Contabo shared account stuck on 5.7 (provider says "soon" for 2 years now) and I need to move a WordPress + custom app to a Vultr VPS running 8.0. The custom app uses some older SQL modes and I'm hitting schema import failures.
Specific errors around datetime defaults and the old GROUP BY behavior. Tried mysqldump with --compatible=mysql40 but 8.0 rejects a bunch of the create statements. Looked at pt-online-schema-change but that's for same-server alterations, not cross-version migration.
What tools or workflows do you actually trust for this? I'd rather not hand-edit a 2GB dump file if I can avoid it.
~be kind or be gone~