Hive was introduced to allow users to run SQL-like queries on large datasets stored in Hadoop. It provides a data warehouse solution built on Hadoop that allows easy data summarization, querying, and analysis of big data stored in HDFS. Hive uses HDFS for storage but stores metadata about databases and tables in MySQL or Derby databases. It allows users to run queries using HiveQL, which is similar to SQL, without needing to write complex MapReduce programs.