It's my first time to use Persistence in developing a Java program because I usually connect via JDBC. I read that for large amounts of data, it is best to use persistence. I tried playing with the CRUD example of Netbeans. It's not very helpful thought because it only connects to the DB and allows addition and deletion of records. I need something that will allow me to manipulate the data like if the value from column C1 of table T1 is such, it will retrieve data from table t2. In short, I need to apply conditions before knowing what to retrieve exactly. The example in CRUD example already has a specific table to retrieve and only acts like a database manager. How is it possible to retrieve a specific item first then from this, will determine the next steps to be done.

I'm also using embedded JavaDB/Derby as my database (also my first time to use because I usually use remote mysql)