I know perl and python is tested solution  for this kind of log parsing and data mining - 
Anybody have experience  dealing with syslog parsing with Java ?
I have to create a Java demon anyway to load the parsed output to DB .. 
So I was thinking why not going all the way - 
python might be useful when I will be running it on different environment.
I translated some Java GC log parser/analyzer from Perl to Java. In Java the code looked like more lines and the code obviously more verbose but the execution was at least 5 times faster.
Log parser solutions python/perl vs Java