Hi, i am looking for any idea/suggestion how to do something like Oracle has, i.e. REGEXP_SUBSTR(source, pattern[, position [, occurrence[, match_parameter]]]) which returns the desired substring. why i need this: i have vast amount of data to parse - i.e. i need to get all of the many possible [parameter=value] pairs from an url access log in order to feed the dimension tables w/parameter-value from the URL by parsing the string directly in MonetDB when i write a SQL function to do this (or any string parsing as a matter of fact), it is rather slow when parsing millions of records. i know that there is the PCRE.MAL and i already use with some success functions INDEX, MATCH or REPLACE but i was not able to find anything similar to the REGEXP_SUBSTR functionality to get the desired substring in one go would most likely help me to get better performance any suggestion? please? thanks milan