Apache Pig - Order By

The ORDER BY operator is used to display the contents of a relation in a sorted order based on one or more fields.

Syntax

Given below is the syntax of the ORDER BY operator.

grunt> Relation_name2 = ORDER Relatin_name1 BY (ASC|DESC);

Example

Assume that we have a file named student_details.txt in the HDFS directory /pig_data/ as shown below.

student_details.txt

001,Rajiv,Reddy,21,9848022337,Hyderabad
002,siddarth,Battacharya,22,9848022338,Kolkata
003,Rajesh,Khanna,22,9848022339,Delhi 
004,Preethi,Agarwal,21,9848022330,Pune 
005,Trupthi,Mohanthy,23,9848022336,Bhuwaneshwar 
006,Archana,Mishra,23,9848022335,Chennai 
007,Komal,Nayak,24,9848022334,trivendram 
008,Bharathi,Nambiayar,24,9848022333,Chennai

And we have loaded this file into Pig with the relation name student_details as shown below.

grunt> student_details = LOAD 'hdfs://localhost:9000/pig_data/student_details.txt' USING PigStorage(',')
   as (id:int, firstname:chararray, lastname:chararray,age:int, phone:chararray, city:chararray);

Let us now sort the relation in a descending order based on the age of the student and store it into another relation named order_by_data using the ORDER BY operator as shown below.

grunt> order_by_data = ORDER student_details BY age DESC;

Verification

Verify the relation order_by_data using the DUMP operator as shown below.

grunt> Dump order_by_data; 

Output

It will produce the following output, displaying the contents of the relation order_by_data.

(8,Bharathi,Nambiayar,24,9848022333,Chennai)
(7,Komal,Nayak,24,9848022334,trivendram)
(6,Archana,Mishra,23,9848022335,Chennai) 
(5,Trupthi,Mohanthy,23,9848022336,Bhuwaneshwar)
(3,Rajesh,Khanna,22,9848022339,Delhi) 
(2,siddarth,Battacharya,22,9848022338,Kolkata)
(4,Preethi,Agarwal,21,9848022330,Pune) 
(1,Rajiv,Reddy,21,9848022337,Hyderabad)