TrustRadius Insights for Apache Pig are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Apache Pig has proven to be an invaluable tool for data engineers working with large datasets in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. Users have found it to be an excellent high-level scripting language that simplifies the process of working with big data. With Apache Pig, data engineers can easily build pipelines for advanced analysis and machine learning purposes, allowing them to transform and optimize data operations into MapReduce.
One of the key advantages of Apache Pig is its ability to write complex map-reduce or Spark jobs without requiring deep knowledge of Java, Python, or Groovy. This feature has been highly appreciated by users who value the efficiency and simplicity it brings to their work. Additionally, Apache Pig's query language, Pig Latin, provides users with a straightforward way to build data pipelines, eliminating redundant data and supporting user-defined functions UDFs.
The software also gives users control over task execution, which is crucial in maintaining control in a distributed processing system. This control allows users to efficiently handle transportation problems and manage large volumes of data including data streaming from multiple sources and performing joins. Users have utilized Apache Pig to explore and process large datasets in big data analytics projects, performing various operations within a single Java Virtual Machine.
Another key use case for Apache Pig is the generation of aggregate statistics, running refinement and filtering on logs, as well as generating reports for both internal use and customer deliveries. Data science and data engineering teams also utilize Apache Pig for building big data workflows pipelines for ETL and analytics. The software simplifies the creation of these pipelines by providing native language support with Pig Latin, combining features from various database systems like Hive, DBMS, and Spark-SQL.
Overall, Apache Pig offers a versatile solution for handling big data tasks in a simple yet efficient manner. Its user-friendly query language and extensive capabilities make it a valuable tool for data engineers working in the Apache Hadoop ecosystem.
As a requirement of a distributed processing system, we are using Apache Pig within our Information Technology department. I use it to an extent of generating reports with advanced statistical methods, both for internal use as well as external purposes. But our Data Science team and Data Engineering team use it to build pipelines in Big Data environment, to conduct further advanced analysis including for machine learning purposes.
Pros
Long logics in Java? Apache Pig is a good alternative.
Has a lot of great features including table joins on many databases like DBMS, Hive, Spark-SQL etc.
Faster & easy development compared to regular map-reduce jobs.
Cons
UDFS Python errors are not interpretable. Developer struggles for a very very long time if he/she gets these errors.
Being in early stage, it still has a small community for help in related matters.
It needs a lot of improvements yet. Only recently they added datetime module for time series, which is a very basic requirement.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is one great option in terms of database pipelining. It is highly effective for unstructured datasets to work with. Also, Apache Pig being a procedural language, unlike SQL, it is also easy to learn compared to other alternatives. But other alternatives like Apache Spark would be my recommendation due to the high availability of advanced libraries, which will reduce our extra efforts of writing from scratch.