Getting results between two dates in PostgreSQL

Assuming you want all "overlapping" time periods, i.e. all that have at least one day in common.

Try to envision time periods on a straight time line and move them around before your eyes and you will see the necessary conditions.

SELECT *
FROM   tbl
WHERE  start_date <= '2012-04-12'::date
AND    end_date   >= '2012-01-01'::date;

This is sometimes faster for me than OVERLAPS - which is the other good way to do it (as @Marco already provided).

Note the subtle difference. The manual:

OVERLAPS automatically takes the earlier value of the pair as the start. Each time period is considered to represent the half-open interval start <= time < end, unless start and end are equal in which case it represents that single time instant. This means for instance that two time periods with only an endpoint in common do not overlap.

Bold emphasis mine.

Performance

For big tables the right index can help performance (a lot).

CREATE INDEX tbl_date_inverse_idx ON tbl(start_date, end_date DESC);

Possibly with another (leading) index column if you have additional selective conditions.

Note the inverse order of the two columns. See:

• Optimizing queries on a range of timestamps (two columns)

 SELECT *
   FROM mytable
  WHERE (start_date, end_date) OVERLAPS ('2012-01-01'::DATE, '2012-04-12'::DATE);

Datetime functions is the relevant section in the docs.