Writing a technical book takes an unpredictable amount of sacrifice every single day. I sincerely believe that nobody could ever complete writing a book alone without the willing sacrifices of family, friends, and coworkers. It is an honor to give credit where credit is due. I am truly blessed to have been in the company of some of the consistently bright people in the world while working on this book.

I owe a deep sense of gratitude to my parents, Prabhakar and Sumathy, who have constantly guided, encouraged, and blessed me; I am sure mere words can never express the magnitude of my gratitude to them. On the home front, I gave up more time with my wife, Sushma, and sons, Sresht and Samvruth, than I'm proud to admit. Thanks most of all to you for your support, love, and patience while I researched, wrote, reviewed, and rewrote the book by stealing your valuable time.

More than anything else, this book has been a team effort right from the beginning. Every member of my team has contributed in one way or another, whether they realize it or not. I am grateful to Salome, Vasundhara Boga, and Pratap for their extraordinary efforts and endless fortitude to help put together the environment, develop the code, and test the output. Without their stellar performances, this book would be incomplete. Their effort reinforces my faith in teamwork—the key ingredient for the success of any endeavor.

Srinivas Uppuluri has been an inspiration right from the beginning of my career, and I am extremely proud to be associated with him. I would like to profusely thank him for reviewing this book at every step and allowing me to be exposed to many great ideas, points of view, and zealous inspiration.

I would also like to thank Dr. Dakshina Murthy who eased me into the world of Big Data analytics and is my mentor and role model in the field of data sciences.

I would like to express my appreciation to all the staff of Packt Publishing for assisting me while editing this book. It was a marvelous effort on their part to shape its outcome for the best. They also made writing my first book an enjoyable experience. I thank everyone involved with Apache Pig. This includes committers, contributors, as well as end users for documenting so much in so little time.

I also want to show appreciation to an e-mail by my previous manager, Sandeep Athavale, which was sent to me a few years ago. In that e-mail, he reposed faith in my writing abilities and encouraged me to write a book one day, thus sowing the seed that culminated in the writing of this book—thank you Sandeep for that action-provoking mail. Through this, I want to let you know that little words of encouragement definitely leave an indelible impression to make improvements to both your personal and professional life.

Thanks to the readers for giving this book a chance. I hope you will definitely find something that can enrich your ideas and trigger new thoughts in you.

Above all, I want to thank all the folks who have helped me in some way or the other to write this book. These are a few of them who happen to be on the top of my mind: Pallavi P, Praveen P, Srini Mannava, Sunil Sana, Ravi Jordan, Haribabu T, Syam A, Robin H, Roopa, Satish B and his family, and so on.

This book is dedicated to the beloved memory of my teammate: Subramanyam Pagadala