Was absent minded this whole day, sorry if my answers took long / were out of context @ the meetup.

I was poking why a bona fide DB import didn't work...

VARCHAR(254) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci GENERATED ALWAYS AS (LOWER(...)) VIRTUAL

MySQL 5.7 to MariaDb 10.5 ...

After long hours of poking:
https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/...

Yeah. It's the COLLATE statement. *narf*

I love SQL, but god damn it this stupid fscking frigging dumb platform and version specific behaviour is fucking annoying.

sed -Ei 's|COLLATE.*GENERATED|GENERATED|g' helps. Just takes a bit of time on an 75G sql dump. -.-

Took only 4.5 hours to find out.

But now test suites are crunching, looking good til now.... *sigh*