The PowerPivot Experiment

When PowerPivot (formerly known as "Gemini") was released, I really wanted to test its real capabilities by trying to import a really large amount of information right into excel and perform aggregations. To this end, I designed a simple relational database with five tables, populated it with data and performed my experiment using PowerPivot. For the record, the total amount of data was more than 100 Million Rows.

In this post I will explain step-by-step the experiment, starting from the database design, then explaining the import process and finally, provide some examples on how I processed this huge amount of data.

Before describing the steps, I would like to list the several software technologies used, as well as the hardware and O/S configuration of my infrastructure.