Spotfire: After clicking "Edit SQL" within Information Link in Information Designer it takes a long time before editing of the SQL query is allowed

Description:
When working with Information Links, there may be times where you need to manually edit the SQL and make use of the "Edit SQL" functionality. When pressing this button, you may notice that it takes a long time until you can use the interface and actually see the SQL editing interface. This article will describe how to make the dialog load much faster.

Symptoms:
When clicking the SQL button for an Information Link, it takes a long time for the Edit SQL dialog to load.

Cause:
Information Services, the component that handles Information Links in the Spotfire environment, validates the metadata from the underlying data source when pressing the Edit SQL button. It does this to validate the integrity of the items belonging to the Information Model. If this takes a long time, it will take a long time before you get through to the SQL editing interface.

Resolution:
To prevent this from happening, you can disable the validation that happens when pressing this button. To do this, follow the steps outlined below:

1. Stop the Spotfire Server.
2. Open the Spotfire Server Configuration tool. Start Menu -> All Programs -> Spotfire Server -> Configure Spotfire Server.
3. Enter the bootstrap / tool password. 
4. Choose "Export configuration from database...".
5. Save it in <server_install_dir>\tomcat\bin\configuration.xml.
6. Open the file <server_install_dir>\tomcat\bin\configuration.xml in Notepad.
7. Right above the row </information-services> add the following line (ensure the runtime-query-validation tag is not already present): 

<runtime-query-validation>False</runtime-query-validation>

This will result in the following:

<runtime-query-validation>False</runtime-query-validation>
</information-services>

8. Save the file.

9. In the Spotfire Server Configuration tool, choose "Load configuration from file...".

10. Load the newly edited configuration.xml.
11. Go to the tab "Configuration".
12. In the bottom right, there is a button named "Save configuration...". Press this.
13. Choose Database (recommended) and save the configuration.
14. Start the Spotfire service.
 

Make sure you have the backup of configuration.xml file before doing any changes in it. This will improve performance with the Edit SQL dialog, but will not affect performance of re-saving a data source or Information Link. To improve the performance for the latter, see the following Knowledge Base article:

Creating new or re-saving existing Information Models and elements take longer than expected