Spark SQL provides relational data processing capabilities in Spark. It introduces a DataFrame API that allows both relational operations on external data sources and Spark's built-in distributed collections. The Catalyst optimizer improves performance by applying database query optimization techniques. It is highly extensible, making it easy to add data sources, optimization rules, and data types for domains like machine learning. Spark SQL evaluation shows it outperforms alternative systems on both SQL query processing and Spark program workloads involving large datasets.