Dear MonetDB developers, when using the EXPLAIN keyword within "mclient --language=sql", I get output like: % .explain # table_name % mal # name % clob # type % 0 # length function user.s0_2{autoCommit=true}():void; .. .. Most notably, apart from the lines starting with %, the syntax resembles the code "mclient --language=mal" would expect. So, a naive approach to use this observation would be to filter out the % lines and feed the output together with some boilerplate code into "mclient --language=mal" (example using a bash unix shell): echo "EXPLAIN SELECT 1;"| mclient --language=sql| ( echo "sql.init();" grep -v ^% echo "user.s0_2();" )| mclient --language=mal For very simple SQL statements, this works and creates the expected output. However, as soon as tables come into play, I'm getting errors because of uninitialized variables. So there seem to be at least semantical differences between EXPLAIN's MAL output and the MAL "mclient --language=mal" expects. Is this difference documented somewhere? Is there a better way for ad-hoc translation from executable SQL to executable MAL? Best regards, Isidor Zeuner