The advantages depend on your particular use case. If you use a single SQL Insert over JDBC to add a large batch once an hour, for example vs streaming API to do the same - there won't be any advantage. If you have batches that you want to insert every minute, for example, then streaming will be much better. Generally, if your data is available as a continuous stream, streaming will allow you to land it in the target table at very small time intervals and make it immediately visible to readers. The same can't be done efficiently with JDBC. Streaming API has been integrated with NiFi, Flume and Storm - so there are tools for ingesting event streams into Hive vs the build-it-youself JDBC approach.
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