Spotfire Server: Unable to create a MySQL datasource via Spotfire Information designer.

When you try to create and save the MySQL datasource via Spotfire Information services it may fail with the following error message:
 

java.sql.SQLException: The server timezone value 'EDT' is unrecognized or represents more than one timezone. 
You must configure either the server or JDBC driver (via the serverTimezone configuration property) to use a more specifc timezone value if you want to utilize timezone support.

To resolve add the following code to the JDBC url and resave:

?useUnicode=true&useJDBCCompliantTimezoneShift=true&useLegacyDatetimeCode=false&serverTimezone=UTC

Example:

jdbc:mysql://<host>:<port>/<database>?useUnicode=true&useJDBCCompliantTimezoneShift=true&useLegacyDatetimeCode=false&serverTimezone=UTC 

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26515700/mysql-jdbc-driver-5-1-33-time-zone-issue