This sounds a lot like what I did in my last job using bash for most things, and php for the more complicated stuff. Wrote a simple oracle to pgsql table replicator in php that worked pretty well.
Well we do this stuff all the time with Oracle and sql*plus. And I've heard people hear say about how much better psql is than sql*plus. So I figured surely someone would have figured that its a really slick way of automating imports and scheduling with cron... and then blogged about it. But it looks like I'm on my own.
