Let say you have the radiobuttonlist control as follows :-
<asp:RadioButtonList ID="rbl" runat="server">
<asp:ListItem Text="General" Value="1"></asp:ListItem>
<asp:ListItem Text="Reserve" Value="2"></asp:ListItem>
</asp:RadioButtonList>
Now you can do this in two steps as described below :-
i) Assuming you got the value as '1' from DB which is 'General'.
Then get the ListItem by the value you have as below -
ListItem item = rbl.Items.FindByValue("1");
We can pass the appropriate value which we are getting from database rather than passing the string "1" here. Also if you are getting the text from database like "General" then you can use the method 'FindValueByText' here.
ii) Now in the second step we can set the selected index by setting the selected index of this item in radiolist as below :-
rbl.SelectedIndex = rbl.Items.IndexOf(item);
Hope this will be of help for you.