Think Different

The NASA Acquisition Internet Service (NAIS) ( http://nais.nasa.gov/ ) is responsible for providing the general public with information regarding contract opportunities with the revered space organization. A network of servers interconnecting 12 of NASA's field installations, NAIS is the only means for obtaining acquisition information for contracts ranging between $25,000 and $500,000. Saving NASA and its partners roughly $4 million annually, the NAIS model has been so successful that it has been adopted by the U.S. FedBizOpps program ( http://www.eps.gov/ ) as a means for providing access to contracting opportunities for the entire U.S. Government. Furthermore, NAIS supports several thousand users, and receives on average 300,000 hits each month. Given NAIS' mission-critical purpose at NASA, quite a few heads turned when they announced the successful conversion of the NASA Acquisition Internet Service database backend from Oracle to MySQL. Restructuring of Orac...

Istockphoto.com is the biggest royalty-free stock photo community in the world, and its sister company, istockpro.com, is home to a host of illustrious professional photographers. Every week, approximately 5,000 photographers upload more than 2,500 photos (2.5 GB) to MySQL® -- the world's most popular open source database -- and approximately 1,250(1.25 GB) are accepted and posted to istock Web sites. More than 200,000 customers, including corporations, advertising and public relations agencies, and individuals access these photo databases and download 20-30 GB daily for a variety of uses. The MySQL database tracks every photo submitted and manages the permissions and billing, all for the fraction of the cost of traditional database systems. "We operate a classic LAMP system," says Patrick Lor, executive vice president. "MySQL enables us to grow our business at a rate of 15 to 30 percent a month. “A traditional database would have required at lea...