SQLite to PostgreSQL data-only transfer (to maintain alembic functionality) - postgresql

Question

There are a few questions and answers already on PostgreSQL import (as well as the specific SQLite->PostgreSQL situation). This question is about a specific corner-case.
Background
I have an existing, in-production web-app written in python (pyramid) and using alembic for easy schema migration. Due to the database creaking with unexpectedly high write-load (probably due to the convoluted nature of my own code), I've decided to migrate to PostgreSQL.
Data migration
There are a few recommendations on data migration. The simplest one involved using
sqlite3 my.db .dump > sqlitedumpfile.sql
and then importing it with
psql -d newpostgresdb < sqlitedumpfile.sql
This required a bit of editing of sqlitedumpfile. In particular, removing some incompatible operations, changing values (sqlite represents booleans as 0/1) etc. It ended up being too complicated to do programmatically for my data, and too much work to handle manually (some tables had 20k rows or so).
A good tool for data migration which I eventually settled on was pgloader, which 'worked' immediately. However, as is typical for data migration of this sort, this exposed various data inconsistencies in my database which I had to solve at source before doing the migration (in particular, removing foreign keys to non-unique columns which seemed a good idea at the time for convenient joins and removing orphan rows which relied on rows in other tables which had been deleted). After these were solved, I could just do
pgloader my.db postgresql:///newpostgresdb
And get all my data appropriately.
The problem?
pgloader worked really well for data but not so well for the table structure itself. This resulted in three problems:-
I had to create a new alembic revision with a ton of changes (mostly datatype related, but also some related to problem 2).
Constraint/index names were unreliable (unique numeric names generated). There's actually an option to disable this, and this was a problem because I needed a reliable upgrade path which was replicable in production without me having to manually tweak the alembic code.
Sequences/autoincrement just failed for most primary keys. This broke my webapp as I was not able to add new rows for some (not all) databases.
In contrast, re-creating a blank database using alembic to maintain the schema works well without changing any of my webapps code. However pgloader defaults to over-riding existing tables, so this would leave me nowhere as the data is what really needs migrating.
How do I get proper data migration using a schema I've already defined (and which works)?

Answer 1

What eventually worked was, in summary:-
Create the appropriate database structure in postgresql://newpostgresdb (I just used alembic upgrade head for this)
Use pgloader to move data over from sqlite to a different database in postgresql. As mentioned in the question, some data inconsistencies need to be solved before this step, but that's not relevant to this question itself.
createdb tempdb
pgloader my.db postgresql:///tempdb
Dump the data in tempdb using pg_dump
pg_dump -a -d tempdb > dumped_postgres_database
Edit the resulting dump to accomplish the following:-
SET session_replication_role = replica because some of my rows are circular in reference to other rows in the same table
Delete the alembic_version table, as we're restarting a new branch for alembic.
Regenerate any sequences, with the equivalent of SELECT pg_catalog.setval('"table_colname_seq"', (select max(colname) from table));
Finally, psql can be used to load the data to your actual database
psql -d newpostgresdb < dumped_postgres_database