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

In Information Designer, creating new or re-saving existing Information Models and elements take longer than expected.

Description:
When creating or saving elements and information models in Information Designer towards a specific data source, it can under certain circumstances take a very long time (or longer time than expected).

Symptoms:
In addition to the behavior explained above, when turning on debug logging for the TIBCO Spotfire Server, you may see entries such as the following:

DEBUG 2014-04-30T11:36:26,656+0200 [user, thread] ds.sql.BasicJDBCMetadataProvider: map column type (jdbc-type=12, type-name=VARCHAR2, precision=4, scale=0) to class java.lang.String
DEBUG 2014-04-30T11:36:26,656+0200 [user, thread] ds.sql.BasicJDBCMetadataProvider: map column type (jdbc-type=12, type-name=VARCHAR2, precision=24, scale=0) to class java.lang.String
DEBUG 2014-04-30T11:36:26,656+0200 [user, thread] ds.sql.BasicJDBCMetadataProvider: map column type (jdbc-type=2, type-name=NUMBER, precision=0, scale=-127) to class java.lang.Double
DEBUG 2014-04-30T11:36:26,656+0200 [user, thread] ds.sql.BasicJDBCMetadataProvider: map column type (jdbc-type=2, type-name=NUMBER, precision=0, scale=-127) to class java.lang.Double

Cause:
When creating and saving partial or whole information models in Information Designer, Spotfire Server needs to validate metadata on the database server for the schema and tables you are working with. If the database server responds slowly to these metadata calls due to slower performance on the database server, it may not have time to validate all metadata before the already validated and cached parts time-out.

The default metadata cache time-out is set to 5 seconds. If the metadata validation is not completed in 5 seconds, Spotfire Server will need to validate the section previously held in the cache again.

Try to improve performance of the database server as this can affect many Spotfire database operations. If this is not an option, you can work around the issue by editing the time-out value for the metadata cache on the Spotfire Server. To implement this change, follow the steps below.
 

Changing the metadata cache time-out:

• Export the current configuration to a file named configuration.xml using the TIBCO Spotfire Server Configuration Tool.
• Edit the exported XML.
• Find the ending "jdbc" tag:

</jdbc>

• Insert the line below, right above the ending "jdbc" tag:

<cache-lifetime-seconds>60</cache-lifetime-seconds>

• It should now look like the following:

<information-services>
   ...
   <jdbc>
      ...
      <cache-lifetime-seconds>60</cache-lifetime-seconds>
   </jdbc>
   ...

</information-services>?

• Save the file.
• Use the Spotfire Server Configuration Tool to load and save the newly edited configuration .xml file to your Spotfire Server database.
• Restart the Spotfire Server.

You should now be able to see if the issue persists or not. If it does persist but you do see a change in how long it takes to fully execute, it may be that you need to increase this value to more than the 60 seconds in the example shown above.