First of all, why are you getting it from the database as a string? Is it stored as a string in the database, or as a date, time or timestamp type? If it's the latter,
you should get it as a java.sql.Date or java.sql.Timestamp:
If there's really no other way then to get it as a string from the database, then you could parse the string into a java.util.Date object using java.text.SimpleDateFormat, and then you can use methods like before() and after() on the Date object to compare it to the current date.