Sun Wins Top Tech Innovation Award

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Sun's DTrace trouble-shooting software won top prize in the Wall Street Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards competition. It's the second time in three years that Sun took the top award. From the article, which also names a dozen other winners: 'Where most debugging takes place as software is being developed, DTrace analyzes problems with systems that are in production — running a company's database, say, or executing stock trades. It does this with a process called "dynamic tracing," which enables a developer or systems administrator to run diagnostic tests on a system without causing it to crash. Before DTrace, such tests often took days or weeks to reproduce the problem and identify the cause. With DTrace, performance problems can be tracked to their underlying causes in hours, even minutes.'"

Comments

Re:Strace?!

[HaeMaker]

Yea, this is the Wall Street Journal. It's like that old joke about Hollywood Squares: "According to Redbook, what is Plank's constant?" Not really an authoritative source on technical innovation.

Re:Hmmm.

[TheGratefulNet]

If it can, that's great and can Sun kindly port it to Linux. If it can't, then all I can say is that the competition must've sucked this year.

what an ODD way to think of things!

"if it doesn't run on linux then its not worth an award"

such a small universe you live in...

Re:Strace?!

[andyross]

The strace tool just traces system calls on a user process. It isn't really comparable to DTrace, which is essentially a scripting language that can be hooked to any function call, anywhere in the system, including the kernel. It's quite slick.

The closest linux equivalent is the Systemtap project, which is based on the kprobes low level hooking API. These aren't yet billed as ready for production systems, but they'll get there soon enough. They look quite slick, also.

That said, the WSJ award seems to me to be maybe a little overstated. While Sun fanboys will shout to the heavens (with some justification, even) that DTrace is an amazing tool with absolutely no counterpart in the linux world, the fact remains that DTrace is at best an incrementally amazing tool. System performance tuning is a hard task, requiring smart developers and lots of work. System performance tuning with DTrace is a hard task requiring smart developers and a little less work.

System performance tuning using DTrace and a typical Solaris IT wonk (a population that tends to correlate highly with the fanboys pushing DTrace the hardest) is a recipe for disaster.

If you find someone telling you that DTrace is a must have tool and indispensable to the systems developer, apply salt. But yeah, it's pretty slick.

Re:Strace?!

[TheRaven64]

That said, the WSJ award seems to me to be maybe a little overstated.

Sun definitely deserves an innovation award this year, but I would not have said it was for DTrace. DTrace is an incredibly nice tool, but I would put it well behind ZFS. ZFS is the first filesystem I have looked at in detail and liked everything I've seen. BeFS came close (I only found one thing I disagreed with in the design there), but ZFS does much, much more.

The UltraSPARC T1 is also a very nice chip, and possibly deserves this kind of thing, although I am more interested in the T2 since I tend to do a lot of FPU-intensive things.