If git cannot do this, the two solutions I see are:

1. modify the script I use to dump the database to remove things that are irrelevant to version control drawback: removing some of these things might cause the dump to no longer be viable for import)

2. store each database dump somewhere else (maybe named by commitID somehow within a hook) and version control a modified version. eg, cat dump.sql | grep -v "_session" >> dump.sql

but it would be ideal if I could add a grep like this to git somewhere

If git cannot do this, the two solutions I see are:

1. Modify the script I use to dump the database to remove things that are irrelevant to version control. (drawback: removing some of these things might cause the dump to no longer be viable for import)

2. Store each database dump somewhere else (maybe named by commitID somehow within a hook) and version control a modified version. e.g.,cat dump.sql | grep -v "_session" >> dump.sql, but it would be ideal if I could add a grep like this to git somewhere.