The Scaling with Flash webinar I’ve mentioned earlier was a success and we got the recording available. It contains Percona presentation, presentation of Schooner appliances and Q&A session. Enjoy.

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A couple of months ago, we published a post on making your site a closer. But, before your website can close a sale, it has to get the visitor's attention. Presenting your visitor with a landing page that's relevant to what she's looking for is the best way to start the conversation and proceed towards the conversion or sale. Of course, you'll want to pair your landing pages with the appropriate keywords and ads. But, what else can you do to get more visitors to become customers?

Google Website Optimizer can help you identify the copy, images, and page layout combination that is most effective at getting visitors to convert. The key is to use Google Analytics to find out which landing pages are least effective, so you can start working on those first. Our first Google Analytics + Website Optimizer in 60 Seconds video shows you how.



Do you have a tip on using Google Analytics and Website Optimizer together? Feel free to post a comment and share. And, be sure to check out the techie guide for more advanced Website Optimizer tips.


Posted by Melissa Hsieh, Google Analytics Team

It's hard to be a relational database lately. After years of faithful service everywhere you look the world is turning against you:

Recently at the NoSQL conference 150 revolutionaries met with their new anti-RDBMS arms suppliers. And you know what happens when revolutionaries are motivated, educated, funded, and well armed.

The revolution has gone mainstream when Computerworld writes No to SQL? Anti-database movement gains steam. It's not just whispers anymore, it's everywhere.

And perennial revolutionary Michael Stonebraker runs from blog to blog shouting the The End of a DBMS Era (Might be Upon Us). Relational vendors are selling legacy software, are 50x slower than other alternatives, and that can not stand.

The Greek Chorus on Hacker News sings of anger and lies.

Certainly some say stick with the past. It's your fault, you aren't doing it right, give us another chance and all will be as it ever was. Some smirk saying this is nothing but a return to a more ancient time when IBM was King.

But it's in the air. It's in the code. A revolution is coming. To what? That is what is not yet clear.

Update 3: Presentation from the NoSQL Conference: slides, video.
Update 2: Jim Wilson helps with the Understanding HBase and BigTable by explaining them from a "conceptual standpoint."
Update: InfoQ interview: HBase Leads Discuss Hadoop, BigTable and Distributed Databases. "MapReduce (both Google's and Hadoop's) is ideal for processing huge amounts of data with sizes that would not fit in a traditional database. Neither is appropriate for transaction/single request processing."

Hbase is the open source answer to BigTable, Google's highly scalable distributed database. It is built on top of Hadoop (product), which implements functionality similar to Google's GFS and Map/Reduce systems.

read more

Update 3: Presentation from the NoSQL conference: slides, video 1, video 2.
Update 2: The folks at Hypertable would like you to know that Hypertable is now officially sponsored by Baidu, China’s Leading Search Engine. As a sponsor of Hypertable, Baidu has committed an industrious team of engineers, numerous servers, and support
resources to improve the quality and development of the open source technology.
Update: InfoQ interview on Hypertable Lead Discusses Hadoop and Distributed Databases. Hypertable differs from HBase in that it is a higher performance implementation of Bigtable.

Skrentablog gives the heads up on Hypertable, Zvents' open-source BigTable clone. It's written in C++ and can run on top of either HDFS or KFS. Performance looks encouraging at 28M rows of data inserted at a per-node write rate of 7mb/sec.