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Day: April 1, 2026

Compressing Images in R

Published 2026-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Yihui Xie announces a new package:

Last month, @bastistician opened an issue on the litedown repo pointing out that knitr has a hook_pngquant() function for compressing PNG plots from code chunks, but litedown lacks such a feature. He included a reasonable workaround—calling system2("pngquant", ...) with litedown::get_context("plot_files") in a chunk at the end of the vignette. It shrank his vignette from 80 KB to 54 KB, which is a 33% reduction. Not bad.

The catch, of course, is that it requires pngquant to be installed on the system. For R users, installing a system binary is more friction than it sounds: it is brew install pngquant on macOS, a separate package manager invocation on Linux, and hunting down a standalone executable on Windows. If you maintain a package that others will build, you are now asking all of them to do this—for every machine they use. By contrast, install.packages("tinyimg") works the same way everywhere, which is the kind of simplicity that makes a tool actually get used.

This is why I created tinyimg.

Read on for more details about how tinyimg works, how well it compresses, and how it integrates with litedown.

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Power BI Version Control via Azure DevOps

Published 2026-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers works with the on-again, off-again CI/CD solution Microsoft has to offer:

In this blog post is a way set up version control for Power BI semantic models (and reports) using the PBIP (Power BI Project) format, Azure DevOps (Azure Repos), and VS Code.

This approach treats your semantic model as readable text files (JSON/TMDL), enabling proper Git diffing, branching, merging, and collaboration—something binary .pbix files don’t support well.

Click through for the process.

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Apache Airflow Jobs in Fabric Data Factory

Published 2026-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Kromer makes an announcement:

The world of data integration is rapidly evolving, and staying up to date with the latest technologies is crucial for organizations seeking to make the most of their data assets. Available now are the newest innovations in Fabric Data Factory pipelines and Apache Airflow job orchestration, designed to empower data engineers, architects, and analytics professionals with greater efficiency, flexibility, and scalability.

Read on to see what’s newly available, including some preview functionality.

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Auditing SQL Agent Jobs for a Migration

Published 2026-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword takes a peek:

Most SQL Server environments have more jobs, schedules, and hidden complexities than you realise. It’s only when you arrive at a migration and peek under the hood that the scale is clear.

Here we’ll pull out details from msdb to give a clear snapshot of what you’ll actually be dealing with. If you don’t understand the effort upfront, the migration will expose it.

The thrust of Andy’s post covers migration, but I think it’s a good query to run simply to get a better understanding of all of the jobs in your environment.

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New Permissions in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Andreas Wolter digs into some new permissions:

This article provides a brief overview of the new permissions introduced with SQL Server 2025 and the few adjustments to existing ones.

Overall, the changes are subtle – which is not surprising. The past couple of years have focused heavily on SQL Database in Fabric, Entra ID integration, and incremental improvements rather than major changes to the core permission model.

All newly introduced permissions are tied to new functionality. The underlying permission model itself remains unchanged since its last significant evolution in SQL Server 2022.

Even so, click through to see what’s new and what granting EXECUTE across the board can net you in SQL Server 2025.

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