title: Using Pig/Hive for data processing instead of direct java map reduce code?
body: <p>(Even more basic than <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3356259/difference-between-pig-and-hive-why-have-both">Difference between Pig and Hive? Why have both?</a>)</p>
  
  <p>I have a data processing pipeline written in several <strong>Java map-reduce</strong> tasks over Hadoop (my own custom code, derived from Hadoop's Mapper and Reducer). It's a  series of basic operations such as join, inverse, sort and group by. My code is involved and not very generic. </p>
  
  <p>What are the pros and cons of continuing this admittedly development-intensive approach vs. migrating everything to Pig/Hive with several UDFs? which jobs won't I be able to execute? will I suffer a performance degradation (working with 100s of TB)? will I lose ability to tweak and debug my code when maintaining? will I be able to pipeline part of the jobs as Java map-reduce and use their input-output with my Pig/Hive jobs?</p>