"Things that could be trivially done in SQL :(" We use HIVE over HDFS. Sure the type of things we are doing could have been done in SQL, if we had carefully curated our data set and chosen which parts to keep and which to throw away. Unfortunately, we are greedy in the storage phase. Hive allows us to save much more than we reasonably would need, which actually is great when we need to get it long after the insert was made.