10.1. Thinking like a Pig

Pig has a certain philosophy about its design. We expect ease of use, high performance, and massive scalability from any Hadoop subproject. More unique and crucial to understanding Pig are the design choices of its programming language (a data flow language called Pig Latin), the data types it supports, and its treatment of user-defined functions (UDFs) as first-class citizens.

10.1.1. Data flow language

You write Pig Latin programs in a sequence of steps where each step is a single high-level data transformation. The transformations support relational-style operations, such as filter, union, group, and join. An example Pig Latin program that processes a search query log may look like