Transferring and transforming data from SDM into ArcHouse.

The scenario

A group of Housing Association's had procured Orchard Information Systems' ArcHouse Housing Management System running on Windows and had planned to move all the group members over to it.

The second planned migration was from the SDM Housing Management System.

Data extraction

PickSoft chose to extract the data from SDM on a nightly basis through batch scripts on the local SDM server. After extraction, the data was compressed using 7Zip and copied to a central server for processing.

Overnight on a central server, the data extracted from Simdell (unidata) was translated and loaded into a Microsoft Access database. The resultant database was defragmented, compressed and sent via PuTTY SFTP to PickSoft's servers.

Data transformation

On PickSoft's servers the raw SDM data was converted into PickSoft's housing data unified form. This involved forming common and rents data from the appropriate tables in SDM. Once the tables were formed, the parameters could be extracted for the manual parameter mapping.

Parameter mapping

Each of the parameters that needed to be mapped were identified during the Data transformation process. These were presented on spreadsheets in a consistent way to allow them to be mapped and verified by several people on the project as well as any other interested parties in the organisation. For more information please see the