Question - What is Apache Pig and why is it preferred over MapReduce?
Answer -
Apache Pig is a Hadoop-based platform that allows professionals to analyze large sets of data and represent them as data flows. Pig reduces the complexities that are required while writing a program in MapReduce, giving it an edge over MapReduce.
The following are some of the reasons why Pig is preferred over MapReduce:
- While Pig is a language for high-level data flow, MapReduce is a paradigm for low-level data processing.
- Without the need to write complex Java code in MapReduce, a similar result can easily be achieved in Pig.
- Pig approximately reduces the code length by 20 times, reducing the time taken for development by about 16 times than MapReduce.
- Pig offers built-in functionalities to perform numerous operations, including sorting, filters, joins, ordering, etc., which are extremely difficult to perform in MapReduce.
- Unlike MapReduce, Pig provides various nested data types such as bags, maps, and tuples.