Pig Latin

The programming language used to write Pig queries is called Pig Latin.

The MapReduce programming model can be thought of as composed of three distinct phases:

1. Process input records
2. Form groups of related records
3. Process groups into outputs

In MapReduce, the first two of these steps are handled by the mapper, and the third step is handled by the reducer. Pig Latin exposes explicit primitives that perform actions from each phase. These primitives can be composed and reordered. Furthermore, it includes additional primitives to handle operations such as filtering and joining data sets.