Parse a Pandas column to Datetime when importing table from SQL database and filtering rows by date

Pandas is aware of the object datetime but when you use some of the import functions it is taken as a string. So what you need to do is make sure the column is set as the datetime type not as a string. Then you can make your query.

df['date']  = pd.to_datetime(df['date'])
df_masked = df[(df['date'] > datetime.date(2012,4,1)) & (df['date'] < datetime.date(2012,4,4))]