Apache Hive is a data warehousing system for large volumes of data stored in Hadoop. However, the data is useless unless you can use it to add value to your company. Hive provides a SQL-based query language that dramatically simplifies the process of querying your large data sets. That is especially important while your data scientists are developing and refining their queries to improve their understanding of the data. In many companies, such as Facebook, Hive accounts for a large percentage of the total MapReduce queries that are run on the system. Although Hive makes writing large data queries easier for the user, there are many performance traps for the unwary. Many of them are artifacts of the way Hive has evolved over the years and the requirement that the default behavior must be safe for all users. This talk will present examples of how Hive users have made mistakes that made their queries run much much longer than necessary. It will also present guidelines for how to get better performance for your queries and how to look at the query plan to understand what Hive is doing.