I've found compression to be one of the big benefits of Hive / Impala; we are able to load and manipulate compressed data very quickly compared with our friends

I've found compression to be one of the big benefits of Hive / Impala; we are able to load and manipulate compressed data very quickly compared with our friends using a RDBMS who have to uncompress and then import the data. This shortens the cycle time on some analytics challenges by days (typically we get data in the 3-8TB range) where we can answer simple questions in a few hours (and senior management loose focus immediately afterwards).