I was having trouble comparing dates in Scala Slick. It turned out to be human error.
There are a lot of posts on Stack Overflow about the difficulty of comparing date types (such as Joda.date.DateTime) in Scala Slick. However, I was using Java.sql.Date, which should be supported directly by Slick, so these discussions turned out to be red herrings.
The upshot is that there is a big difference between these two lines:
query1.filter(test => test.startDate <= dt && test.endDate >= dt) // OK
query1.filter(test => dt >= test.startDate && dt <= test.endDate) // NOPE