In a September 11 article, Innovation Awards: The Winners Are ..., The Wall Street Journal named the DTrace troubleshooting software, part of Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System, as the Gold winner in the Journal's 2006 Technology Innovation Awards contest. The initial applications numbered more than 600. Wow says it all.According to the Journal, DTrace "analyzes problems with systems that are in production—running a company's database, say, or executing stock trades" with a dynamic tracing process. Pinning down the underlying causes for performance problems takes hours, sometimes minutes only, which the judge said provides "much better visibility" than other products.

Brian Cantrill and a team of engineers at Sun were the brains behind DTrace. Congratulations.