Thanks @zwass... figured it out. Apparently I need to create my mysql DB exactly as how it's done in the osquery-in-a-box project. I created with

mysqld --datadir=/tmp/data --event-scheduler=ON

and it now works. Not sure if it's the datadir, or event-scheduler that I needed

I'm not sure that either of those would be the cause of the error you encountered, but nevertheless, glad you worked it out.