Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. Uses MySQL to Power Self-Service Intranet

Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. (SST) designs, manufactures and markets a range of nonvolatile memory solutions based on SuperFlash technology for high-volume applications in the digital consumer, networking, wireless communications and Internet computing markets. The 500-person public company chose the MySQL database as the foundation for the company's "self-service" intranet - a heavily database-dependent, highly scalable method of distributing Web page maintenance to the employees responsible for the content.

By using PHP, Apache, and MySQL on a Sun E450, the SST intranet team was able to create a core system that has a homepage for each department, a profile for each employee, and easy methods for uploading files and creating online forms. Every form ties into an automatically generated database backend for data storage and mining activities. Employees can modify everything with simple edit buttons, and no HTML skills are necessary.

"Our project is extremely dependent on the database backend, as every Web page requested results in many queries," said Michael Kristopeit, Senior Web Developer at SST. "We needed speed, and we got it with MySQL. Also, being able to administer MySQL ourselves has tremendously decreased our time to deploy new features, making the users of the system very happy and confident in our tools. Because of our quick response time, many of the in-house business processes are moving to the intranet.

"MySQL is blazingly fast on SELECT statements, so we are able to recursively rip through the entire employee table to generate a live Web-based org chart, showing all 500 employees (with photos), properly nested, continued Kristopeit. "MySQL has also scaled wonderfully and hasn't shown any signs of slowdown yet!"

Security is of such importance to SST that everything done on the intranet is logged into MySQL. Almost every single file request -- from HTML to PDFs -- is routed through a PHP file that verifies the user's record and passes on the file only if appropriate. SST also uses MySQL's "log-update" option to record every change to the database tables, as an extra security measure.

"We have seen SST's intranet blossom," said Anthony Boyd, Manager of Web Technology at SST. "At any given time during the workday, approximately 20 percent of our workforce is using the site. Employees have fleshed out their profiles and double-checked the accuracy of their data. All the data is searchable, and that is thanks to some fairly tricky regular expressions that MySQL supports. MySQL is the database we've chosen, and it has served SST incredibly well."