Laravel whereDate() Silently Kills Your Index

whereDate('created_at', $date) looks clean, but on a big table it quietly drops your index and does a full scan. The Problem Say you want notifications created on a specific day. The obvious call: UserNotification :: query () -> whereDate ( 'created_at' , '2026-04-23' ) -> get (); Laravel generates this SQL: SELECT * FROM user_notifications WHERE DATE ( created_at ) = '2026-04-23' See DATE(created_at) ? MySQL has to compute that function for every row before comparing. Your created_at index is u