Apache Drill is a distributed SQL query engine that enables fast analytics over NoSQL databases and distributed file systems. It has a plugin-based architecture that allows it to access different data sources. For NoSQL databases, Drill leverages secondary indexes to generate index-based query plans for predicates on non-key columns. For distributed file systems like HDFS, Drill performs partition pruning based on directory metadata and filter pushdown based on Parquet row group statistics to speed up queries. Drill's extensible framework allows data sources to provide metadata like indexes, statistics, and partitioning functions to optimize query execution.