Most enterprise software companies in the financial sector traditionally built solutions on Oracle. This was because in the 80s and even early 90s, the holy gra

Most enterprise software companies in the financial sector traditionally built solutions on Oracle. This was because in the 80s and even early 90s, the holy grail of financial systems (MVCC - multiversion concurrency control with guaranteed transactions) was offered relatively cheaper by Oracle during that period compared to IBM's big iron solutions. This was a winning strategy for Oracle. They dominated new projects during the 90s client-server revolution. Over time this didn't matter as many RDBMS offered advanced MVCC features and transactional guarantees "on the cheap". (MS SQL and pgsql being late bloomers to this club - there are many other good databases that do similar). Your professor is probably a veteran from the heydays of Oracle's dominance. The meme of Oracle (i.e. if the system is developed using Oracle being default good) still carries in the minds of many financial execs and CTOs. But it is fading fast. I personally wouldn't touch Oracle for my enterprise startup which provides BI solutions for asset managers. We use SQL Server and pgsql.