Installing database drivers for Information Designer

To be able to access data from a JDBC-compliant data source with Information Services, you must install the appropriate JDBC driver on the computer that is running Spotfire Server.

About this task

Note: If you have a clustered server deployment, you must install the driver on all computers that run Spotfire Server in the cluster.

Procedure

Download the database driver.
Place the driver in the following directory: <installation dir>/tomcat/custom-ext-informationservices.

Note: This is the recommended directory for most JDBC drivers. There might be some JDBC drivers that you must install to a different directory. For information on some known exceptions, see JDBC Data Access Connectivity on the TIBCO Community.

Note: If you are using Oracle as the Spotfire database and you want to access data with information services (regardless of whether you want to access Oracle data), you must add the same Oracle jar file in both directories <installation dir>/tomcat/custom-ext and <installation dir>/tomcat/custom-ext-informationservices.
Restart Spotfire Server.

Important:

In versions 12.1 and later, Information Services runs in its own subprocess. During the upgrade, extensions for Information Services are extracted from the Spotfire Server extensions folder custom-ext and placed into a separate folder custom-ext-informationservices, and the configuration property information-services.external-process.use-legacy-extensions is set to true. This still allows the Information Services process to also use drivers from the custom-ext folder.

However, it is highly recommended that you manually move Information-Services-related drivers to the custom-ext-informationservices folder. Set the configuration property information-services.external-process.use-legacy-extensions to false after you have placed all required drivers in the custom-ext-informationservices folder.

What to do next

To connect to an external data source, you must also add and/or enable a data source template that matches the database and the specific database driver.

You can add and enable data source templates in two different ways:

Note: The database connection URL, used by the server to connect to the database, may differ for different database drivers; see Database drivers and database connection URLs.