JDBC Design
Just as Java was designed to provide platform independence from hardware/software platforms, so too JDBC has been designed to provide some degree of database independence for developers. JDBC is designed to provide a database-neutral API for accessing relational databases from different vendors. Just as a Java application does not need to be aware of the operating system platform on which it is running, so too JDBC has been designed so that the database application can use the same methods to access data regardless of the underlying database product.
JDBC was developed to work with the most common type of database: the relational database. This is not to say that JDBC cannot be used with another type of database. In fact, there are JDBC drivers that allow the API to be used to connect to both high-end, mainframe databases, which are not relational, and to access flat files and spreadsheets as databases (which are definitely not relational). But the reality is that JDBC is most commonly used with relational databases.