Emulate REGEXP like behaviour in DB2 SQL

I posted the same on stackoverflow (please, let me know if I have to delete one).

I'm working on a DB2 database and as far as I can see regexp is not supported (without additional libraries).

So I cannot implement something similar to what is explained in this article "Bringing the Power of Regular Expression Matching to SQL"

Do you know if I can "emulate", with a SQL statement, a regular expression like this?


^a[aofdmep]{1}[a-z]{1}[a-z0-9]{4}[sidbfkfpo]{1}

Edit

In the above hypothesis I found that it's acceptable for my case a WHERE Like predicate:


WHERE USER_NAME NOT LIKE 'a_______'

But it's a unsafe and doesn't cover other cases where I don't have a fixed char that I can match.

Since this old question has been dug up anyway, I'll mention that you can use the built-in XQuery support in DB2 for regular expression matching, something along the lines of

select whatever
from users
where
   xmlcast(
     xmlquery('fn:matches($USER_NAME,"^a[aofdmep][a-z][a-z0-9]{4}[sidbfkfpo]")') 
     as integer) = 1

XMLQUERY above calls the XQuery matches function against the column USER_NAME. The result is an XML boolean, so the XMLCAST is used to convert it to an SQL data type.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#651, answer score: 12