This document discusses improvements to Hive performance and functionality in the Stinger initiative. Stinger includes changes to Hive and a new project called Tez, with two main goals: improve Hive performance by 100x and extend Hive SQL for analytics. Stinger is divided into three phases, with phase 1 focusing on optimizations, phase 2 adding YARN resource management and Hive on Tez, and phase 3 adding a buffer cache and cost-based optimizer. Hive 0.11 delivers performance gains through optimizations like improved map joins and collapsing jobs. It also introduces new technologies like Tez, ORC files, and vectorization. Standard queries now run much faster, with some seeing over 50x speedup. Future work will further reduce query startup