Compare dates in Oracle SQL I have a table LoanDeadline that has a column called deadline, it's simple text and not Date and it's in the format of 

July 25, 2014


How do I compare this with sysdate ? 
So far I have

SELECT 'YOUR LOAN IS APPROVED'
FROM LOANDEADLINE LD
WHERE SYSDATE &lt; LD.DEADLINE;


But this doesnt work because my SYSDATE and LD.DEADLINE are different  data types.
WHERE SYSDATE &lt; to_date( LD.DEADLINE, 'Month DD, YYYY' );


would work assuming all your data is perfect and that all your session are configured to use English month names.  I would strongly recommend, however, that you fix the data model.  Storing strings that represent dates rather than actual dates is a terrible practice.  Inevitably, you end up with at least a handful of columns where the data is invalid which would cause this query to fail.  You could work around that by creating a function that attempts to convert the string to a date and catches the exception if there is an error and then use that function in your query, i.e.

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION my_to_date( p_str IN VARCHAR2, p_format IN VARCHAR2 )
  RETURN date
IS
BEGIN
  RETURN to_date( p_str, p_format );
EXCEPTION
  WHEN others
  THEN
    RETURN NULL;
END;


and then

WHERE SYSDATE &lt; my_to_date( LD.DEADLINE, 'Month DD, YYYY' );