I was a SQL Server DBA on the 96th Floor of World Trade Center North Tower in 1992
By Kalman Toth, M.Phil. Physics, M.Phil. Computing Science, MCDBA, MCITP

Member of World Trade Center Health Registry

September 11, 2010

The company was Deloitte-Touche. Going to work was like going to haven. Frequently work in the clouds. On bright days look out the huge windows and see people like ants! Yes they were like ants from the 96th floor. The Brooklyn Bridge was like a tiny toy bridge on a toy train set. My office had long, elongated windows from floor to ceiling, supporting steel beams in between. Standing close to the windows gave you a feeling of fear of falling: what if the thin glass breaks if I lean against it? Perhaps I should store a parachute in case I have to escape from a fire. I never did though. We dutifully drilled escaping fire through the stairs, usually 10-20 flights down. We never drilled all the way down 96 floors.

The version was around 4.2 or so. Interestingly enough a robust Transact-SQL was already there (it originated with Sybase on UNIX platform). It has more features now, but the basics were just like now: selects, inserts, updates, deletes, transaction control and sp_ system stored procedures like sp_who, sp_spaceused, sp_monitor and more.

The operating systems was IBM OS/2.

The predecessor of Enterprise Manager (or Management Studio in SQL 2005) was rather simple, mainly used for maintenance functions. Backup was called "dump" and restore was called "load".

The predecessor of Query Editor was called isql. Less fancy, but it had the basics: connection to the server, query window and results window. In fact you could connect to a Sybase database as well, and hardly tell the difference.

The OS/2 based SQL server was not nearly as powerful as SQL Server 2000. Processing tables with a million rows took great-great care. With a few careless stored procedures, you could kill the system.

At that time SQL server was in the category of "ligh tweight" database, next the UNIX-based heavy weights like ORACLE and SYBASE or the mainframe based DB2.

SQL Server came along a very long way riding with the spectacular progress of Windows-based PC-s and servers.

On 9/11/2001 I was on the 25th floor of 111 Wall Street working for Citibank. That is the last building on Wall Street by the East River. I went to work at 8am on a beautiful sunny day, by 8:50 the 25mph wind was bringing paper sheets like snowflakes by my window. My happy SQL-ing was interrupted by the unfolding immense tragedy. At 10:30 I was escaping amid nuclear war like conditions in white smoke burning my eyes and throat, F-16-s roaring overhead unseen because of the smoke. Later I figured it out. I was in the thinning white smoke of the South Tower collapse, while the billowing dirt cloud of the second collapse was coming toward me. I did not know if I will live or die, just kept walking toward the Brooklyn Bridge. After six blocks of nuclear winter type walking with thousands of others, the Sun appeared: I am going to live!