- Facebook relies heavily on open source software like Apache Hadoop and Hive for its data warehousing and analytics needs. Hive provides an SQL-like interface to query large datasets stored in Hadoop's HDFS distributed file system using MapReduce. - Hive optimizes SQL queries by merging joins, sharing common operations between queries, and load balancing MapReduce jobs. It uses a metastore to manage metadata and Thrift APIs for access. - Facebook contributes to open source projects like Cassandra, MemcacheD, and improvements to PHP and uses Hadoop and Hive to efficiently handle large amounts of structured data and queries in a scalable, redundant manner.