Logical and Physical Plan PIG Script

Question

Need help in differentiating between the Logical and Physical plan of an Apache Pig script

Answer 1

Logical and Physical plans are created during the execution of a pig script. Pig scripts are based on interpreter checking. Logical plan is produced after semantic checking and basic parsing and no data processing takes place during the creation of a logical plan. For each line in the Pig script, syntax check is performed for operators and a logical plan is created. Whenever an error is encountered within the script, an exception is thrown and the program execution ends, else for each statement in the script has its own logical plan.

A logical plan contains collection of operators in the script but does not contain the edges between the operators.

After the logical plan is generated, the script execution moves to the physical plan where there is a description about the physical operators, Apache Pig will use, to execute the Pig script. A physical plan is more or less like a series of MapReduce jobs but then the plan does not have any reference on how it will be executed in MapReduce. During the creation of physical plan, cogroup logical operator is converted into 3 physical operators namely –Local Rearrange, Global Rearrange and Package. Load and store functions usually get resolved in the physical plan.