The presentation offers a retrospective on the formation and development of Fermilab – the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory for high-energy particle physics in the US. Based on her personal professional experience working at Fermilab, the speaker will highlight the Laboratory’s history, its famous researchers who laid the groundwork for its growth, its world-class scientific achievements and discoveries, and the challenges it faced and the solutions developed in response. In addition, she will introduce some exceptional researchers who made key contributions to the success of the scientific programmes. Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a landmark experiment in astrophysics, as an example, the speaker describe the work of the database administrators in Fermilab, in which she was directly involved.