Reza Rad explains why your Power BI data size might be abnormally large:
If you have a large *.pbix file, you can investigate what are the columns and tables that causing the highest storage consumption, using Power BI Helper. You can download Power BI Helper for free from here. I opened the file above in Power BI Helper, and in the Modeling Advise tab, this is what I see:
As you can see in the above output, the Date field in the Date table is the biggest column in this dataset. taking 150MB runtime memory! This is considering that we have only three distinct values in the column! Seems a bit strange, isn’t? let’s dig into the reason more in deep.
Read on for Reza’s explanation and what you can do to fix it.