Selecting a View consumes 4GB memory but executing SQL statement of View only 70 MB
The 'actual' execution plan explains the issue - the estimated number of rows coming into the SORT is 5.3 million, so Sql Server allocates a large block of memory to hold it.  However, the 'actual' number of rows is much less.



A sort operation needs to spool all the data and it estimates that there is 3.7GB to spool. Additionally the amount of memory needed to actually sort is more than the actual size of data itself.