I'm relatively new to salesforce development, and am not sure if the data loader is the best tool for what I'm trying to do, or if I should write something custom using the salesforce apis.

Basically, we have a service management platform (sage) that I believe uses SQL, that we need to import data from into salesforce nightly. We are only concerned with a one-way sync, and should only need to import records once. There are a couple different objects we'll be importing into, and it's possible that some objects (accounts) may already exist, in which case they would be ignored. Also, we'd like to do some sort of fuzzy matching to prevent duplicates, which appears to be available in salesforce, but I'm not sure what kind of interaction that has with the data loader. We'll also need to do things like translate values from the source system into picklist values in salesforce, but I imagine things like that are supported out of the box in the data loader. I've looked into the data loader cli implementation, but I'm worried that we might get hung up on not being able to support one or more of the above requirements, which has me leaning to something custom (which still shouldn't be terrible I imagine). If anyone has any wisdom they'd like to share, that would be greatly appreciated!