Tracy McKibben

My real name is Tracy McKibben. I’ve been working with database products for over 20 years, starting with FoxBase running on Xenix. Over the years, I’ve worked with all flavors of FoxPro, some Clipper and dBase, and starting somewhere around 1995, SQL Server. I’ve even dabbled with Oracle, though I’ve tried to block out all memories of that experience.

At present, I’m the Senior SQL Server DBA and the DBA Team Supervisor for Pearson VUE. All opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not reflect the opinions of Pearson VUE.
  • Interests: Tech, gadgets, model railroading, photography, and of course SQL Server!

All authors

All authors

Blogs

A field note: AI Ambition vs. Operational Reality in 2025

By

Ivan Jelić, Group CEO at Joyful Craftsmen, reflects on what separates AI success from...

Redefining Tech Leadership in the Age of Microsoft AI

By

AI is no longer a niche capability – it is a leadership catalyst. As...

Sample Data with GenAI in Seconds

By

A friend was asking for help with some data analysis. This was in PowerBI,...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

How a Legacy Logic Choked SQL Server in a 30-Year-Old Factory

By Chandan Shukla

Comments posted to this topic are about the item How a Legacy Logic Choked...

do i lose "what this object depends on" etc when moving sprocs to etl server

By stan

Hi i was surprised to see the approach my coworkers used to sunset talend...

People Make Odd Choices

By Grant Fritchey

Comments posted to this topic are about the item People Make Odd Choices

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Query Plan Regressions --

For the Question of the day, I am going to go deep, but try to be more clear, as I feel like I didn't give enough info last time, leading folks to guess the wrong answer... :) For today's question:  You’re troubleshooting a performance issue on a critical stored procedure. You notice that a previously efficient query now performs a full table scan instead of an index seek. Upon investigating, you find that an NVARCHAR parameter is being compared to a VARCHAR column in the WHERE clause. What is the most likely cause of the query plan regression?

See possible answers