This is just a simple question about performance: say you have a big list of events, some past and some in the future. The past events will not be used other than for statistics. What's the best way to query the database about future events:

... WHERE date > NOW()

...or...

... WHERE hasbeenprocessed = FALSE

i would go with the date comparison, simply because as far as i know mysql doesn't support booleans

I really meant to ask if calculating this by date was slower than an other way (I gave the example of a bool, but it could be a tinyint or enum). Is would seem that checking for a "flag" is quicker than comparing dates.

it would seem? you'll need to run a volume test then