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