Update database records based on date column - spring

Question

I'm working on a app where I have some entities in the database that have a column representing the date until that particular entity is available for some actions. When it expires I need to change it's state, meaning updating a column representing it's state.
What I'm doing so far, whenever I ask the database for those entities to do something with them, I first check if they are not expired and if they are, I update them. I don't particularly like this approach, since that means I will have a bunch of records in the database that would be in the wrong state just because I haven't queried them. Another approach would be to have a periodic task that runs over those records and updates them as necessary. That I also don't like since again, I would have records in a inconsistent state and in this case, the first approach seems more reasonable.
Is there another way of doing this, am I missing something? I need to mention, I use spring-boot + hibernate for my application. The underlying db is Postgresql. Is there any technology specific trick I can use to obtain what I want?

Answer 1

in database there it no triger type expired. if you have somethind that expired and you should do somethig with that there is two solutions (you have wrote about then) : do some extra with expired before you use data , and some cron/task (it might be on db level or on server side).
I recomend you use cron approach. Here is explanation :
do something with expired before you get data :
updated before select
+: you update expired data before you need it , and here are questions - update only that you requested or all that expired... update all might be time consumed in case if from all records you need just 2 records and updated 2000 records that are not related you you working dataset.
-: long time to update all record ; if database is shared - access to db not only throth you application , logic related to expired is not executed(if you have this case); you need controll entry point where you should do something with expired and where you shouldn't ; if time expired in min , sec - then even after you execure logic for expired , in next sec new records might be expired too;also if you need update workflow logic for expired data handling you need keep it in one plase - in cron , in case with update before you do select you should update changed logic too.
CRON/TASK
-: you should spend time to configure it just once 30-60 mins max:) ;
+: it's executed in the background ; if your db is used not only by your application , expired data logic also be available; you don't have to check(and don't rememebr about it , and explaine about for new employee....) is there any staled data in your java code before select something; you do split logic between cares about staled data , and normal queries do db .
You can execute 'select for update' in cron and even if you do select during update time from server side query you will wait will staled data logic complets and you get in select up to date data
for spring :
spring scheduling documentation , simple example spring-quartz-schedule
for db level postgresql job scheduler
scheduler/cron it's best practices for such things