Export from pig to CSV - excel

Question

I'm having a lot of trouble getting data out of pig and into a CSV that I can use in Excel or SQL (or R or SPSS etc etc) without a lot of manipulation ...
I've tried using the following function:
STORE pig_object INTO '/Users/Name/Folder/pig_object.csv'
USING CSVExcelStorage(',','NO_MULTILINE','WINDOWS');
It creates the folder with that name with lots of part-m-0000# files. I can later join them all up using cat part* > filename.csv but there's no header which means I have to put it in manually.
I've read that PigStorageSchema is supposed to create another bit with a header but it doesn't seem to work at all, eg, I get the same result as if it's just stored, no header file:
STORE pig_object INTO '/Users/Name/Folder/pig_object'
USING org.apache.pig.piggybank.storage.PigStorageSchema();
(I've tried this in both local and mapreduce mode).
Is there any way of getting the data out of Pig into a simple CSV file without these multiple steps?
Any help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

I'm afraid there isn't a one-liner which does the job,but you can come up with the followings (Pig v0.10.0):
A = load '/user/hadoop/csvinput/somedata.txt' using PigStorage(',')
as (firstname:chararray, lastname:chararray, age:int, location:chararray);
store A into '/user/hadoop/csvoutput' using PigStorage('\t','-schema');
When PigStorage takes '-schema' it will create a '.pig_schema' and a '.pig_header' in the output directory. Then you have to merge '.pig_header' with 'part-x-xxxxx' :
1. If result need to by copied to the local disk:
hadoop fs -rm /user/hadoop/csvoutput/.pig_schema
hadoop fs -getmerge /user/hadoop/csvoutput ./output.csv
(Since -getmerge takes an input directory you need to get rid of .pig_schema first)
2. Storing the result on HDFS:
hadoop fs -cat /user/hadoop/csvoutput/.pig_header
/user/hadoop/csvoutput/part-x-xxxxx |
hadoop fs -put - /user/hadoop/csvoutput/result/output.csv
For further reference you might also have a look at these posts:
STORE output to a single CSV?
How can I concatenate two files in hadoop into one using Hadoop FS shell?

Answer 2

if you will store your data as PigStorage on HDFS and then merge it using -getmerge -nl:
STORE pig_object INTO '/user/hadoop/csvoutput/pig_object'
using PigStorage('\t','-schema');
fs -getmerge -nl /user/hadoop/csvoutput/pig_object /Users/Name/Folder/pig_object.csv;
Docs:
Optionally -nl can be set to enable adding a newline character (LF) at
the end of each file.
you will have a single TSV/CSV file with the following structure:
1 - header
2 - empty line
3 - pig schema
4 - empty line
5 - 1st line of DATA
6 - 2nd line of DATA
...
so we can simply remove lines [2,3,4] using AWK:
awk 'NR==1 || NR>4 {print}' /Users/Name/Folder/pig_object.csv > /Users/Name/Folder/pig_object_clean.csv