Yahoo! breeds Pig that talks elephant

If there's one place on earth where swine talk is still met with open arms, it's Yahoo!.

Yahoo! is gradually moving its data-heavy web services onto Hadoop - that Google-inspired open-source platform for crunching epic amounts of information across a sea of distributed machines. And to grease the move, the company has developed its own Hadoop programming language. In typical Hadoop fashion, it's known as Pig.

Hadoop mimics Google's MapReduce framework, which maps data-crunching tasks across distributed machines, splitting them into tiny sub-tasks, before reducing the results into one master calculation. You can write straight to the framework in Java, but Pig aims to put MapReduce coding at a higher level.