This chapter is aimed at providing a broad introduction to multiple technologies and concepts addressed in this book. We start with exploring the concepts related to design patterns by defining them and understanding how they are discovered and applied in real life, and through this, we seek to understand how these design patterns are applied and implemented in Pig.

Before we start looking into the intricacies of the Pig programming language, we explore the background of why Pig came into existence, where Pig is used in an enterprise, and understand how Hadoop fits in the distributed computing landscape in the age of Big Data. We then perform a quick dive into the Hadoop ecosystem, introducing you to its important features. The Pig programming language has been covered from the language features perspective, giving you a ready-made example that is elaborated to explain the language features, such as common operators, extensibility, input and output operators, relational operators, schemas, nulls, and ways to understand the intermediate MapReduce code.