Apache Pig

A scripting platform for processing and analyzing large data sets

Apache Pig is an abstraction over MapReduce. It is a tool/platform which is used to analyze larger sets of data representing them as data flows. Pig is generally used with Hadoop; we can perform all the data manipulation operations in Hadoop using Pig.

Apache Pig is a high-level platform for creating programs that run on Apache Hadoop. The language for this platform is called Pig Latin. Pig can execute its Hadoop jobs in MapReduce, Apache Tez, or Apache Spark. Pig Latin abstracts the programming from the Java MapReduce idiom into a notation which makes MapReduce programming high level, similar to that of SQL for RDBMSs. Pig Latin can be extended using User Defined Functions (UDFs) which the user can write in Java, Python, JavaScript, Ruby or Groovy and then call directly from the language.

Apache Pig is a platform for analyzing large data sets that consists of a high-level language for expressing data analysis programs, coupled with infrastructure for evaluating these programs. The salient property of Pig programs is that their structure is amenable to substantial parallelization, which in turns enables them to handle very large data sets.

At the present time, Pig's infrastructure layer consists of a compiler that produces sequences of Map-Reduce programs, for which large-scale parallel implementations already exist (e.g., the Hadoop subproject). Pig's language layer currently consists of a textual language called Pig Latin, which has the following key properties:

• Ease of programming. It is trivial to achieve parallel execution of simple, "embarrassingly parallel" data analysis tasks. Complex tasks comprised of multiple interrelated data transformations are explicitly encoded as data flow sequences, making them easy to write, understand, and maintain.

• Optimization opportunities. The way in which tasks are encoded permits the system to optimize their execution automatically, allowing the user to focus on semantics rather than efficiency.

• Extensibility. Users can create their own functions to do special-purpose processing.

Pig vs SQL

In comparison to SQL, Pig

• uses lazy evaluation,

• uses extract, transform, load (ETL),

• is able to store data at any point during a pipeline,

• declares execution plans,

• supports pipeline splits, thus allowing workflows to proceed along DAGs instead of strictly sequential pipelines.