The Personal Site of Jamel Cato



   Jamel Cato in 2008  

A Better Definition of Business Intelligence

January 25th, 2009

At one point I considered asking my boss to formally change my job title to “Business Intelligence Application Architect.” Although that’s the contemporary way to refer to the type of work I do, I faced enough blank stares at the sound of it to change my mind.

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Tags: Business Intelligence · Jamel Cato

Solving problems importing data into MS Access

November 30th, 2008

Most of my business time is spent with Oracle, SQL Server and Cache databases, but for minor ETL tasks too big for Excel and too small for Informatica, I often break out Microsoft Access. When importing data into Access, I sometimes get its dreaded Import Errors or experience other problems. I commonly run into these kinds of issues when importing one of our hospital’s charge master files because charge codes often contain alpha characters and asterisks mixed in with numbers.

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Tags: Jamel Cato · Microsoft Access

RIP Michael Crichton

November 11th, 2008

The high spirits I felt at the election of Barack Obama were tempered upon hearing of the death of Michael Crichton, one of my all-time favorite authors.

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Tags: Books · Jamel Cato · Michael Crichton · Pleasure Reading

An Easy Way to Master INDEX/MATCH Formulas

September 1st, 2008

At least once a month I use an INDEX/MATCH formula to match and merge patient data from multiple Excel files. I wrote this post because when I first sought to learn the technique I found the other tutorials on the web either lacking or hard-to-follow.

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Tags: Data Analysis · Excel · Jamel Cato