easiest way to coerce "?m/?d/yyyy" strings to a date in monetdb?

hi, i have a VARCHAR column with dates like "1/1/2014" and also "12/31/2014" since there are no leading zeroes, the months and days are in different positions so i cannot use something like this to CAST it into a date type. CAST( SUBSTRING( x , 7 , 10 ) || '-' || SUBSTRING( x , 1 , 2 ) || '-' || SUBSTRING( x , 4 , 5 ) AS DATE ) AS y could someone offer advice to convert this string field to date in monetdb? thanks!!