See my problem with Pig is that it doesn't unit test well. It's easy, it's quick, it's fairly powerful, but unit testing is horrible. I spent 3 days extending PigUnit to make it easier to overload hard coded reference files in the script so you can provide mock test files. Even getting this to work, and having under 5 megs of reference file for the test, the test takes 3 minutes for 7 simple filters and joins and about 900 megs of RAM.

Compare this to Cascading which is far easier to unit test.

Also PIG is a hog when it comes to making jars. If you don't install pig on EVERY node in the cluster and rather provide it via a submitted uber jar, the jar is HUGE (50 or so megs). PIG's dependencies are ridiculous.

Again compare to Cascading who has a far smaller foot print.

I would like to a strong comparison of HBase. Pig is useful for one-off, ad-hoc stuff, but I don't think it's production ready.