About the Relativity of Large Data Volumes

Some conversations in our team are really priceless. The other day, while working on an article about Analyzing Performance Data in PowerPivot, I was bragging to Ashvini about the fact that I was able to import a 55 GB database with more than 200 million rows of data into a 1 GB PowerPivot workbook, as illustrated in the following figure, and then I found myself flabbergasted when Ashvini asked back, "Why is this workbook so large?" - Clearly, the concept of large data volumes must be relative to the observer. So, let's see why this workbook is so large and what we can do to deal with this data volume.