If you afraid that the condition will keep the optimizer from using an index on the columns, you are right, the use of functions in most DBMS has this effect. There are some exceptions to the rule but not in MySQL.

If you want indexes to be considered (and possibly used), you have to conevrt the condition to one without functions applied to columns.

Your condition, (if table2.other_date_column is not nullable), is equivalent to:

 (  table1.indexed_column &gt; table2.other_date_column 
 OR table1.indexed_column IS NULL )


Using coalesce on an index column
First of all, thank you very much to all these that are trying to solve our problems in this forum;)

I am developing a web application with struts2+spring3. And I have a question about how to pass a variable (an array of arrays) from the action class to the jsp page.

I know that the only you need to do is to declare a private variable in my action and a get method for that variable and then its possible to access these variable from the jsp, I have done it and it works.

public class Workspace extends ActionSupport {

private String[][] objects=null;

public String[][] getObjects() {
    return objects;
}

public String execute() throws Exception{


The problem is that I want to access to this variable from the javascript code before loading the whole web page.

I have tried by different ways but it is never working.

$(function() {
var objectsMap=new Array();

    $(document).ready(function() {
          objectsMap = $objects;
    });


neither works (the alert says: "Value: undefined"):

    &lt;s:set name="auxObj" value="%{objects}"/&gt;
    &lt;script&gt;
        alert("Value: "+$("#auxObj").val());
    &lt;/script&gt;


Anyone have idea about how could I do that?

Thank you very very much!
