The 3 different built in channel types available in Flume are-
MEMORY Channel – Events are read from the source into memory and passed to the sink.
JDBC Channel – JDBC Channel stores the events in an embedded Derby database.
FILE Channel –File Channel writes the contents to a file on the file system after reading the event from a source. The file is deleted only after the contents are successfully delivered to the sink.
MEMORY Channel is the fastest channel among the three however has the risk of data loss. The channel that you choose completely depends on the nature of the big data application and the value of each event.