Right, I *can* do this. But then I have to build knowledge into that script so it can find each of these date fields (there's like 20 of them across 10 different files) and then update that knowledge each time it changes.
In your case that's a reasonable argument against filtering the data with a script. Using a regular expression in the script might reduce or eliminate the need for some of the logic, but then you'd run the risk of reformatting data that shouldn't have been touched.
Yes, but :
You can have your script make a query in the database to fetch the data types of the fields and then know which ones are to be transformed and how. The script would take as arguments a dump file and a database,schema.table, would read the file and pipe the transformed data into a psql with a COPY FROM stdin command... could save you a lot of work no ?
A bonus is that your script can complain if it detects incompatibilities, and be more fool-proof. Plu
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