Apache Pig is a high-level language framework for Hadoop that makes it easy to analyze very large datasets stored in HDFS without having to implement complex Java MapReduce applications. The language of Pig is called Pig Latin, which is a data flow language. While the goal of both Pig and Hive frameworks is similar, the language layers of these two frameworks complement each other by providing a procedural language and a declarative language, respectively.
Pig converts Pig Latin queries in to a series of one or more MapReduce jobs in the background.
In order to install Pig, we recommend you use one of the freely available commercial Hadoop distributions as described in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Hadoop v2. Another alternative is to use Apache Bigtop to install Pig. Refer to the Bigtop-related recipe in Chapter 1, Getting Started with Hadoop v2 for steps on installing Pig using the Apache Bigtop distribution.