Were you asking him about what kind of db would be best suited for your project (i.e. relational, document based, graph, etc.), or were you asking about specifi

Were you asking him about what kind of db would be best suited for your project (i.e. relational, document based, graph, etc.), or were you asking about specific products, like Postgres vs. Mariadb? If it was the latter, then I doubt he could have answered that even if he had taken the db course at his college. And that's probably fine, I don't think the differences between specific db products counts as the sort of fundamental knowledge that should be taught at a university.