Identify areas where we can reduce dependence on third party libraries

[cheezyrock]

In this project, we use a number of third party libraries, some of which rely on deprecated functions and may not last forever.

We need to identify these libraries where we can remove the library in favor of existing libraries within the frameworks we use.

This will be an ongoing task for the foreseeable future. Each identified library should have a separate issue opened for each section where that library can be removed. This can include, but is not limited to, writing out own code to mimic the function with language primitives and base types.

[hollowtree11]

One possible unnecessary third party library is in build_where_text (within postgres_connector.py), where we are performing significant manual string manipulation (TRIM, ILIKE, CONCAT). Manual SQL building is prone to security vulnerabilities and is often where third-party library updates break code. Instead, we can utilize Psycopg2’s sql module (psycopg2.sql).