The Hive Stinger initiative aims to enhance the performance of Apache Hive by introducing features such as faster queries, support for the ORC column store format, and vectorization for improved efficiency. It replaces MapReduce with Apache Tez for reduced latency and higher throughput, facilitating quicker interactive queries and batch processing. Users are encouraged to implement Stinger enhancements by upgrading to Hive 13, utilizing ORC, enabling vectorization, and configuring the execution engine to Tez.