Hive has several advantages over other Datawarehouse solutions.

1. it is java based. This allows it to take advantage of UDF. The best and the moste complicate way to write them as generic UDFs. The other important aspect is to make them blessed UDF by mean they are global and accessible to any user. Generic UDF can produce any hive type from integer to complexe map structure.
2. it can read/write into hbase and take advantage of a key-value store.
3. it is ACID compliant, and provide both insert/update. However, this new feature is not well integrated with other tools such apache spark or facebook presto.
4. it supports multiple level of performance tunning such partitionning, bucketting, bloom filters, predicate pushdown.

Still hive has several disavantages:

1. lack or support for sequences. The workaround right now is to either use a UUID - this has several drawbacks such performances/storage issue. A second approach is to use the sequence_nb + (row_number() over()) function where sequence_nb is maintained into a table - the count of the inserted rows need to be added to the sequence. The last solution is a long, but it cannot be used concurrently. The solution cannot be used in production.