How do you handle data type conversion when moving data between different DBMSs?
One thing that keeps annoying me in cross-DB work is that data migration always sounds cleaner than it actually is.
On paper it’s like, sure, move data from SQL Server to PostgreSQL or Oracle, map the fields, done. In real life it turns into “why did this text field become weird,” “why did this timestamp shift,” “why did this numeric value technically convert but still come out wrong enough to cause problems later,” and suddenly half the job is just checking what got quietly mangled.
The actual transfer is often not even the worst part. What eats time is the paranoia afterward. Row counts, spot checks, failed casts, weird formatting issues, precision mismatches, blob/text nonsense, all the fun little surprises that show up once the schema stops being polite.
I’ve handled it with custom SQL and Python before, which works, but it starts feeling like I’m rewriting the same migration stress in slightly different forms every time. Lately I’ve also been looking at tools that are supposed to reduce some of that pain, and dbForge Edge caught my eye mostly because it seems more focused on cross-DB schema/data work than just basic query editing.
How people here actually handle it when the schema is a bit messy and not tutorial-friendly. Do you mostly trust your own scripts, rely on migration tools, or just accept that validation is going to eat part of your soul every single time?