The Syntax Barrier

The most intuitive approach is often the most naive. I spun up a local PostgreSQL instance and attempted to directly import the MySQL 5.7 .sql dump.

It failed immediately. The syntax variations, data type strictness, and schema handling between an aging MySQL instance and a modern PostgreSQL engine are simply too vast. Writing a manual regex or transformation script to clean the dump file would be an agonizing, error-prone time sink.

This was a dead end. We needed a dynamic translation layer, not a static file patch.