Pig - Hadoop: The Definitive Guide - page 531

Table 16-6. Pig Latin types

Category Type Description Literal example

Boolean boolean True/false value true

Numeric 32-bit signed integer

int 1

64-bit signed integer

long 1L

32-bit floating-point number

float 1.0F

64-bit floating-point number

double 1.0

biginteger Arbitrary-precision integer

'10000000000'

bigdecimal Arbitrary-precision signed decimal num-
ber

'0.110001000000000000000001'

Text

chararray Character array in UTF-16 format

'a'

Binary

bytearray Byte array

Not supported

Temporal datetime Date and time with time zone Not supported, use ToDate built-in

function

Complex Sequence of fields of any type tuple (1,'pomegranate')

Unordered collection of tuples, possibly
with duplicates

bag {(1,'pomegranate'),(2)}

Set of key-value pairs; keys must be
character arrays, but values may be any
type

map ['a'#'pomegranate']

The complex types are usually loaded from files or constructed using relational operators.
Be aware, however, that the literal form in Table 16-6 is used when a constant value is
created from within a Pig Latin program. The raw form in a file is usually different when
using the standard PigStorage loader. For example, the representation in a file of the
bag in Table 16-6 would be {(1,pomegranate),(2)} (note the lack of quotation
marks), and with a suitable schema, this would be loaded as a relation with a single field
and row, whose value was the bag.
Pig provides the built-in functions TOTUPLE , TOBAG , and TOMAP , which are used for
turning expressions into tuples, bags, and maps.
Although relations and bags are conceptually the same (unordered collections of tuples),
in practice Pig treats them slightly differently. A relation is a top-level construct, whereas
a bag has to be contained in a relation. Normally you don't have to worry about this, but